Ghana's incumbent President John Agyekum Kufuor of the ruling New Patriotic Party won the presidential election held Tuesday, securing him another term of four years, Chairman of the Ghanaian Electoral Commission Kwadwo Afari-Gyah said in Accra Thursday night.

"Now I declare Kufuor as the winner of the election held on Dec. 7," Afari-Gyah said at a press conference.

The official said votes from 225 constituencies out of the total of 230 have been counted and Kufuor secured 4,463,731, or 52.75 percent, while his major challenger John Evans Atta Mills from the National Democratic Congress (NDC) obtained 3,750,830, which is 44.32 percent.

A total of 10.3 million Ghanaians registered to vote on Tuesday to select their president and 230 parliamentarians for the next four years, in the west African country's fourth successive democratic elections since the end of military rule in 1992. Voter turnout was 83.2 percent, Afari-Gyah said.

According to electoral laws, a presidential candidate with over 50 percent of the votes during the first round of voting will be declared winner. Otherwise, the two leading candidates will face a runoff election 21 days later.

Kufuor came to the presidency in 2000 by defeating Mills in a second-round election.