The full reasoning behind the decision by the Tamale High Court in ordering for a rerun of the Kpandai parliamentary election has been released.
The Court presided over by His Lordship Emmanuel Brew Plange last week ordered for a rerun of the election, directing that a fresh poll be held within 30 days from the day the judgment was delivered.
The petition alleged irregularities in the voting and collation processes that undermined the credibility of the outcome.
In the judgment, the judge questioned how the Electoral Commission (EC) declared the winner of the election when the materials and machines that held the evidence had been destroyed.
His Lordship Emmanuel Brew Plange also raised concerns over the discrepancies in the figures captured on the face of the pink sheets.
He ruled that if the candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) “won convincingly the pink sheets must authoritatively speak to that fact but when the violent disruption started the respondents’ own versions of the aftermath point to incomplete collation and announcement to relocate and then in another vein relocation to a different venue said to be the Tamale regional office where the collation continued without the petitioner but with some alleged NDC executives the declaration was done or made, and the question is which room number of the regional office was it held and only with the 1st respondent and two persons present”.
The judge further noted that “Before I conclude the destroyed materials and equipment which would provide the evidence no longer existed so how could the 2nd respondent compare and check the collated results to determine authoritatively that the 1^{st} respondent indeed won hands down. In the light of section 19 of PNDC Law 284, only one relief is available in my view and that is to rerun the election in Kpandai constituency from the bottom of my heart.”
“It is in the light of the various written addresses of the respective counsel for the parties that I hereby order a rerun of the KPANDAI parliamentary election to satisfy the constitutional requirements of free and fair and transparent election result.”
The judge also raised concerns over the handwritting by those engaged by the EC on the election day.
He stated that some of the figures captured on the pinksheets did not add up.
“We have gone past free SHS and it seems we are not getting better in our handwriting particularly for the kinds of personnel the EC engages for the election exercise and clearly some of the figures do not add up in the following pink sheets especially when we know the noisome pestilence of the average Ghanaian mouth which the Japanese have labelled us as MIGA which is translated to mean we talk too much but do very little in sense. It is our penchant and reputation for over confidence which betrays our true intent and disastrous writing habits which punish us in our zealous propensity to write but rather miswrite and even stating figures is the worst of the exercise and beats one’s imagination.
It is a fact of judicial notoriety that the scientific arithmetic is a precision aid to engineering, accounting and every field of study including law and one plus one is two except the religionists who maintain that one plus one is one for their spiritual scale and where we have two candidates with final figures of 27,000 plus and 24,000 plus something ordinarily the former is bigger than the latter but when the documentary answer sheet giving rise to the final figures contains irregularities and inconsistencies, how do we settle the final result that it is the correct rendition of events which took place on the 7 th December, 2024.
Let’s put aside the videos and the destruction of the ballot materials and BVD machines and the relocation of the collation center to Tamale without notice to the petitioner and the pink sheets summarizes every numerical infraction which goes to the roots of the results and for the numerous authorities cited by both counsel for the respondents in a Siamese fashion as well as the petitioner’s counsel, the fact remains that the pink sheet recordings raise substantial questions as to what has happened since our last two or three elections in which petitions were filed in court and the electoral officers cannot write legibly, is a terrible indictment on the EC’s conduct of elections in this country.”
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana
