Abstract
Although, there exists numerous literature on the procedure for forecasting or predicting election results, in Ghana only opinion poll strategies have been used. To fill this gap, the paper develops Markov chain models for forecasting the 2016 presidential election results at the Regional, Zonal (i.e. Savannah, Coastal and Forest) and the National levels using past presidential election results of Ghana. The methodology develops a model for prediction of the 2016 presidential election results in Ghana using the Markov chains Monte Carlo (MCMC) methodology with bootstrap estimates. The results were that the ruling NDC may marginally win the 2016 Presidential Elections but would not obtain the more than 50 % votes to be declared an outright winner. This means that there is going to be a run-off election between the two giant political parties: the ruling NDC and the major opposition party, NPP. The prediction for the 2016 Presidential run-off election between the NDC and the NPP was rather in favour of the major opposition party, the NPP with a little over the 50 % votes obtained.
Highlights
The prime concern for any political party is to map up strategies that would aid them to win an election the presidential election
Elections in Ghana can be classified as a random process and similar to the incremental methods, the knowledge of outcomes of previous elections can be used for predictions of future elections
Markov chains are an important type of processes used to study experiments in which the outcomes can be affected by the Nortey et al SpringerPlus (2015) 4:525 outcomes of all previous experiments
Summary
The prime concern for any political party is to map up strategies that would aid them to win an election the presidential election. This paper uses Markov chains generated from previous election data to predict the 2016 presidential elections in Ghana. Confidence intervals for these predictions are obtained from bootstrap percentiles. Jerry John Rawlings took over power in 1981 (Rothschild 1985), he banned political parties until 1992 (Handley 2008) when he lifted the ban and restored the country Ghana to multiparty democracy and introduced a new constitution He later formed a new party called the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and was voted into power in 1992 and 1996 elections (Bimpong-Buta 2005). The stochastic matrix for the model is obtained by averaging the transformation of the previous election results This is the so-called Average Transformation Method (ATM) of Wagner (2012). Other parties which did not take part in run-off elections were recorded zero
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