The petitioners in court
Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com
By William Yaw Owusu
Tuesday April 2, 2013
The much-talked-about landmark election petition
scheduled to proceed today is most likely to witness further delays following fresh
applications filed by the Electoral Commission (EC), the 2nd
respondent in the petition.
As the Ghana’s case lingers on, Kenya disposed of
its election petition within two weeks when hearing started.
Raila Odinga the former Prime Minister has since
accepted the decision of the Supreme Court paving the way for Uhuru Kenyatta to
be sworn in as President by next week.
Ghana’s supreme court was due to set out the
memorandum of issues for the main trial to commence, when the EC on the eve of
the Easter Holidays, filed a two motions on notice for an order for ‘Further
and better particulars of the 2nd Amended Petition’ and another
order granting leave to amend its amended answer that they filed on February 28.
According to the EC whose affidavit in support was
deposed to by Amadu Sulley, the commission’s Deputy Chairman, Finance and
Administration, on March 28, 3013, they are relying on Rule 69A (4) of C.I. 74.
As it, the nine-member panel presided over by
Justice William Atuguba will have to deal with the EC’s request before the Supreme
Court would be able to set out the issues for trial.
Pink
Sheets
The EC claimed that after being served with further
and better particulars, they conducted an examination and analysis which showed
that of the 2,009 Pink Sheets that the petitioners claimed were unsigned, 1,009
were, in fact signed by the Presiding Officer at the polling station or at the
instance of the Returning Officer at the Collation Centre.
They further said 905 were unsigned, representing
3.5 percent of the total number of Pink Sheets nationwide; and 1,989 Pink
Sheets representing 99 percent of the number claimed to be unsigned, were
signed by the polling or counting agents of the candidates.
“Thus the 2nd respondent maintains that
the request by the petitioners votes cast at the said polling stations are
invalid and should be deducted is without merit and should be refused.”
“It should be noted that when several pages of
papers impregnated with a carbon are used in order to have several copies of
each page, it could happen that if the person signing or writing thereon does
not press hard enough on the paper, the signature or writing could appear faint
or illegible on some of the pages,” the EC alleges in its latest amended
answers.
The commission said that the particulars set out in
Ground 2 of the 2nd amended petition
are a mere repetition of those set out in Ground 1 of the 2nd
amended petition and that the particulars provided by the petitioners did not
cover the 11,916 polling stations mentioned in the 2nd amended
petition.
The EC wants the court to compel the petitioners to do
give further and better particulars of the 28 polling stations where the
petitioners are alleging that voting took place but which is not part of the
26,002 assigned polling stations.
The EC further denied the allegation that the
procedure established by it required each polling station to have a unique
serial number and urged the court to reject the petitioner’s contention that
votes recorded in any two polling stations on the Pink Sheets with the same
serial numbers should be invalidated.
Biometric
Verification
According to the EC after analyzing Pink Sheets of
11,916 stations as claimed by petitioners, it realized that no voters were
allowed to vote without biometric verification at any polling station saying
“The Pink Sheet used for the 2012 Election were designed and printed before the
decision was taken, at the instance of the NPP, that at each polling station every
person should be biometrically verified before being allowed to vote.”
Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan - EC Chairman
“In the view of the late decision regarding
verification, all Presiding Officers, during the training exercise were
instructed to leave Question C3 blank as verification would be carried out for
each voter at the polling station.”
“Given that 26,002 polling agents had to be
recruited by the 2nd respondent, some of who were carrying out such
duties for the first time and that the biometric register was being used in
Ghana for the first time, it did happen, in a number of cases, that Question 3
was mistakenly filled. However, this did not affect the number of votes validly
cast and counted in public.”
Order For Parties To Meet
Following the
expiration of the 7 days order issued by the court to the parties to sort out
the memorandum of issues that would be set for the main trial and the parties
failing to agree on almost all the major issues to be set, the petitioners’
lawyers wrote to the court’s registry as directed, to ask the court to set a
date as early as possible.
The court then fixed
today, April 2, 2013 as the date on which it will meet the parties and set out
the issued for them for the main petition to proceed but the EC’s surprise
motion means that the court would have to halt the proceedings and deal with
the EC’s request first.
Further & Better Particulars
According to the EC,
the court in its rulings of February 5 and 7, 2013 ordered the petitioners to
provide ‘further and better particulars’ of the alleged 28 polling stations
referred to in Ground 2 of the 2nd amended petition but the
petitioners have not provided them.
They said that in
paragraph 18 of their amended answer to the petition they responded to Ground 2
of the said amended petition but the petitioners did not “specifically address
the allegation regarding instances of two polling stations recording votes on
Statement of Poll and Declaration of Results Forms (Pink Sheets) bearing the
same serial number and it is the 2nd respondent’s desire to address
same by the insertion of a new paragraph 18(a) contained in the attached
proposed 2nd amended answer to the 2nd amended petition.”
EC’s Proposed Amended Answer
Even though the EC has
already filed an answer to the amended petition it is still seeking to again
amend the answer it filed to challenge the petitioner’s claims.
It said it will deny
allegation in paragraph 8 of the petitioner’s amended petition that the office of
Superlock Technologies Limited (STL) were receiving the results of the
elections before transmitting same to the EC’s Strong Room.
“In answer to paragraph
10 of the 2nd amended petition, the 2nd respondent says
that there was no such arrangement with STL as alleged let alone a secret one.”
They said STL was the
company which, after an international competitive bidding procedure in 2011,
was selected, out of 47 companies, local and international, which submitted
bids, to provide IT services to the EC for the Biometric Registration and
Verification Exercise and that the company had no role to play in the
transmission of election results.
The EC said in answer
to paragraph 9 of the 2nd amended petition, it will repeat its
answer of paragraph 2 and say that copies of the election results were given to
all the representatives of the parties at the constituency collation centres.
It said when the EC wanted to make corrections on 1
million registered voters after its officials made coding errors it notified
Parliament accordingly before embarking on the exercise, using Public Elections
(Registration of Voters) Regulations, 2012 (C.I. 72).
The
Figures
The commission said it announced a provisional
figure of 13,917,366 and after conducting the registration of Ghanaians abroad
made up of foreign service officials, students on government scholarship, those
working in international organizations and the late registration of service
personnel returning from international peacekeeping duties it announced a
figure of 14,158,890.
It says after processing the data to include persons
who were wrongly omitted or included as well as multiple registrations, they
announced a figure 14,031,793 as the voter population and that was the figure
used in printing the Voters Register.
The EC said the word ‘inexplicably’ appearing in the
last line of paragraph 12 of the 2nd amended petition in describing
the different figures given as the Voters Register “is without justification”
and added “The Voters Register is dynamic, not static, particularly in this era
of continuous registration as required by Regulation 9 of (C.I. 72).
The EC said that it forwarded to all the political
parties including the petitioner’s party the total number of registered voters
as 14,031,793 and the figure 14,158,890 stated in the declaration of the
results was an error saying “the correct number of registered voters
(14,031,793) was duly posted on the 2nd defendant’s website.”
“In this context, it is important to emphasise that
this error has no bearing whatsoever on the total votes cast in the election
and, consequently, the valid votes obtained by each candidate. The error would
only affect the turnout percentage and change it from 79.43 percent to 80.15
percent.”
Votes
Declared As Cast
According to the EC, the valid votes when calculated
should be 10,995,262 as stated in the declaration of results as announced by
its Chairman, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan but the petitioners “in a mischievous
attempt to buttress the baseless accusation” made issued against them.
“Paragraph 18 (ii) of the 2nd amended
petition, unlike the petition filed on December 28, 2012, correctly states the
total votes declared by the 2nd respondent as cast in favour of the contesting
presidential candidates.”
The EC said that at all material times, it kept to
its decisions and allocated to each polling station 10 percent ballot papers
that were above the number of registered voters for the polling station and
added that during the printing of the ballot papers it allowed representatives
of the parties to monitor the process.
They said the request by the petitioners to
invalidate the votes of the polling stations where verification process faced
challenges should be refused as unjustified and entirely without merit because
the voting process continued the following day.
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