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The President of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mrs. Jean A. Mensa
The President of the Electoral Commission (EC), Ms. Jean A. Mensa has presented her witness statement in the Electoral Petition case of December 7, 2020 that is currently before the Supreme Court.
In her statement, Ms. Mensa has denied that the Commission has accumulated votes in favor of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo, the President-elect and second respondent in the case.
According to the head of the EC, former President John Dramani Mahama, the petitioner “is not entitled to the exemptions he claims.”
He explained that the actual figures obtained by President Nana Addo were 51.295 percent, which reached the “threshold of more than 50 percent of Article 63 (3) of the 1992 Constitution.”
The statement of the witness of the head of the EC is in line with the orders of the Supreme Court given to the parties in the application for electoral petition filed by Mr. Mahama.
In her statement, Ms. Mensa indicated that she was the Return Officer for the December 7 Presidential Election.
She said that the 2020 Public Election Regulations (CI 127) regulated the December 7, 2020 Election established four stages to collect the result of the presidential election from the voting table to the central office of the Commission.
According to her, in the four stages, the summary of the different votes was compiled and recorded on Form 8B (Polling Station Results and Survey Declaration Form) forms 10, 12 and 13.
He said that candidates or their agents who do not sign or refuse to sign the forms have the opportunity to state the reasons for their refusal to sign on the form and the officials in charge provide a duplicate carbon copy of the summary sheet to each one of the candidates or agents. Present.
Ms. Mensa said that, as shown on Form 13, Nana Addo obtained 6,730,413 of the valid votes, while Mr. Mahama, the petitioner who obtained the second highest number of valid votes, obtained 6,214,889 of the Total valid votes of 13,121,111.
“The calculations showed that the second respondent (Nana Addo) has more than 50 percent of the valid votes.
Clearly, whatever the outstanding results were at the time, they could not mathematically change more than 50 percent of the valid votes obtained by the second respondent (Nana Addo).
It was on this basis that the results of the December 7, 2020, Presidential Election on December 9, 2020 were declared.
She said that when announcing the figures, the total number of votes cast is 13,434, 574 was inadvertently announced as the total votes.
EC Boss said that Form 13 had a total number of votes cast as 13,434,574 and Form 13 was signed by eight agents of the petitioner who were present at the time the form was compiled.
He admitted that there were some errors, but indicated that this “did not affect the constitutional threshold of the candidates.”
Ms Mensa said that when the errors were detected, the next day, those errors were corrected through a press release that was posted on the commission’s website and on other social media platforms or pages.
According to her, the authenticity of the press release had never been denied.
Therefore, on December 9, 2020, the EC president declared the election results without that of Techiman South, which had 128,018 registered votes.
“This statement was made on the basis that even if that constituency, which is 128,018, were assigned to the candidate with the second highest number of votes (the petitioner), it would not change more than 50 percent.
“The Techiman South constituency has vindicated the mathematical basis on which the results were decided.”
He said that when the Techiman Sur constituency form 10 figures were added to the existing votes obtained by the candidates, Nana Addo got 6,776,792 while Mahama got 6,266,923 votes.
Mr. Mahama is on the Supreme Court challenging the validity of the president-elect in the presidential elections on December 7.
He had accused the EC of accumulating votes among others.
The court had ordered the parties, namely the EC and Nana Addo, to present their witness statements.
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