NPP COMPLETES INVESTIGATIONS

The petitioners after a court sitting

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Monday February 4, 2013.

Details have emerged about how the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) uncovered more electoral violations and malpractices in the December 7 & 8, 2012 general elections.

The petition, filed by NPP presidential candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and two others, challenging the validity of the election of John Dramani Mahama as President, is at its preliminary stage at the Supreme Court.

The NPP on January 31, 2012 filed an amended statement to the petition, averring that after completing their analysis of all the pink sheets available to them, they have found substantially more electoral violations and malpractices.

They said the alleged irregularities now affect 4,670,504 votes out of the 10,995,262 "valid" votes cast.

Annulling them will take out 3,101,590 from John Mahama's total and 1,473,346 from Nana Akufo-Addo. 

They are therefore asking for the results in 11,916 polling stations to be annulled, instead of the 4,709 in the original petition.

This will bring John Mahama's total valid votes cast to 39.1% (2,473,171) and Akufo-Addo's down to 3,775,552, making him the clear winner by 59.69%.
This is because about 67% of the illegal votes that the petitioners are asking to be annulled benefited the NDC candidate.

According to the petitioners over 7,000 duplicate pink sheets that have been discovered and claim that the duplicate sheets appeared to have been brought in to swap places with the original pink sheets.

For instance, they claim that exclusive instances of votes recorded in connection with same serial numbers on pink sheets with different results totalled 2,583,633.

They said instances of the joint occurrence of over voting due to total votes exceeding ballot papers issued to voters or the polling station voters register abound while same serial numbers on pink sheets with different results is at 425,396.

It is recalled that John Mahama crossed the mandatory 50% mark by some 150,000 to be declared winner on December 9. Akufo-Addo, on the other hand, needed, some 320,000 off John Mahama's votes for him to win by more than 50%.

What the petitioners are seeking put Nana Akufo-Addo some 20 percentage points ahead of the NDC candidate.

Indeed, the original petition, before the amendment, had enough alleged irregular votes to overturn the results in favour of the NPP candidate.

It remains to be seen how the respondents would attack this over 4 million votes which they are showing evidence for them to be annulled.

According to the petitioners, in the amended statement, the EC "inexplicably issued an inordinate amount of ballots to polling stations relative to the number of registered voters at the polling stations.”

They averred that whereas the declared policy of the 2^nd  Respondent (EC) for the 2012 elections, was to issue polling station ballots of some 5-10% higher than registered voters, the evidence shows that in 11,916 polling stations EC’s voters register (14,031,680 version) indicated total registered voters of 6,189,828 but the ballots issued to the 11,916 polling stations amounted to 11,927,373, nearly twice as many as the registered voters at the polling stations.

“This creates the opportunity for electoral malpractices such as over voting and ballot box stuffing."

“The election in 11,916 polling stations (out of 26,002) was also vitiated by gross and widespread irregularities and/or malpractices which fundamentally impugned the validity of the results in those polling stations as declared by 2nd respondent," the petitioner further averred.

The petitioners also said that there were 28 locations where elections took place which were not part of the twenty six thousand and two (26,002) polling stations created by the EC for purposes of the December 2012 elections and this affected 9,757 votes.