The Chief Executive, Election Researcher and Pollster for Global InfoAnalytics, Mussa Dankwah shared his displeasure with alleged vote-buying activities that took place at the Kumawu Constituency before the by-election.
Mr. Dankwah also gave some analysis on the by-election if compared to other by-elections.
On the Sunrise Show, host, Johnnie Hughes quizzed Mr. Dankwah was his expectations was before the by-election and his response was;
“By-election usually have a turnout. If you look at the kind of resources the NPP deployed in the constituency, including NDC, they were all in their big numbers. So they had made the numbers improve slightly.”
“Things were not the same the last time. When you an independent candidate doing well in the Ashanti Region, it means that the division is quite stacked but we didn’t see that this time around and that helped the NPP candidate.” He added.
Talking about the kind of effort the NDC channeled in to the by-election he said; “The NDC who was also galvanized trying to see how they can improve their numbers and indeed it did if compared to 2020. Their margin went up by almost 9% and that is very remarkable for for Ashanti Region.”
Johnnie asked Mr.Dankwah his take on vote buying and the weight it had on the by-elections he responded; “From the poll we did, it played a very key role because 36% of voters said they would vote because they’re been induced. And when we looked at the data, we realized that 23% of the 30% were voting for NPP’s candidate and those who were voting against the NPP were 13%.”
Johnnie asked Mr. Dankwah if voting buying was helpful to our democracy, he answered; “Absolutely not. We’re telling people we are buying their votes and when they sell their vote to us, what right have we got when they’re not performing well in government and therefore we must keep quite. The parties must take a second look at some of these things.”