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Peter Mac Manu of the NPP and Jean Mensa, President of the EC, have testified against the 2020 NDC presidential candidate, John Dramani Mahama’s electoral petition.
Mr. Mahama seeks to annul the results of the elections won by Nana Akufo-Addo of the PNP and to rerun the ballot boxes.
On January 20, the Supreme Court announced January 26 as the date to start the hearing on the substantive aspect of the petition.
Likewise, it urged the parties to the case to present their respective testimonial statements.
EC witness statement
The EC declaration is 6 pages long and signed by Jean Mensa. She begins her testimony by stating that the information she is providing comes from her own knowledge of the events that led to the filing of the petition and other subsequent matters.
It states that the results of the 2020 elections held on December 7 were compiled in accordance with the 2020 Public Election Regulations (CI 127).
It notes that Nana Akufo-Addo obtained 6,730,413 of the valid votes cast while John Mahama obtained 6,214,889.
He adds that the total of valid votes was 13,121,111.
These figures that she claims show that Mr. Akufo-Addo obtained more than 50% of the valid votes.
Furthermore, it contends that the votes that were pending at the time of the declaration could not mathematically change more than 50% of the valid votes obtained by Mr. Akufo-Addo.
He admits in his testimony that he inadvertently announced 13,434,574 as the total valid votes instead of indicating this figure as the total number of votes cast.
He insists that a simple tabulation of all the votes obtained by each declared candidate amounts to 13,121,111. The form declaring the results, Ms. Mensa says, was signed by 8 agents of the candidates who were present at the time the form was completed.
His inadvertence, he insists, did not affect the threshold of restrictions of 50% plus 1. The error he explains was immediately corrected by the EC the following day through a statement.
Regarding the results of the Techiman South constituency that were outstanding at the time of the statement, Ms. Mensa says that their inclusion or exclusion of the votes obtained by the candidates does not change the outcome of the results.
He concludes his testimony by denying the claims that the Commission accumulated votes in favor of Nana Akufo-Addo.
The testimony of Peter Mac Manu
Peter Mac Manu of the PNP begins his testimony by stating that Nana Akufo-Addo has appointed him to testify on her behalf.
He kicks off the testimony by saying the petition is without merit and is based on ill-conceived and unfounded assumptions.
It explains that the petition does not reveal any attack on the validity of the election held in the 38,622 polling stations and 311 special voting centers.
It describes the accusations of incorrect aggregation of votes and filling of votes as “empty and collectively they involve about 6,622 votes; This is an obviously insignificant sum that materially affects the outcome of an election in which the second respondent defeated the petitioner by more than 500,000 votes.
It also claims that Mr. Mahama does not disclose in the petition the number of valid votes that he believes he actually got and what Mr. Mahama believes that Nana Akufo-Addo got to deserve a second round.
“The petition is largely conjecture and is based on the petitioner’s unfounded imagination,” adds Mr. Manu.
The entire request that he argues is based on the insignificant clarifications and errors that the President of the EC made in her statement.
He further insists that the petition is a ruse and a face-saving stunt deployed by Mr. Mahama after the official results declared by the EC and election observers showed that he had lost the polls despite having claimed victory earlier. .
He ends by noting that he attached videos of NDC leaders to his statement claiming that John Mahama won the election by more than 51% of the votes cast.
It adds that, however, the petition states that no candidate obtained more than 50% of the votes, including the candidate who is said to have won more than 51%, which is John Mahama.
