We lost by 7-0 and even 9-0, we asked for rematch and we lost again - Mahama on election petition
- John Mahama has acknowledged the party’s defeat in the election petition
- The 2020 presidential candidate says the party has closed the chapter on the election petition
- The Supreme Court ruled that the NDC should have presented pink sheets and not excel sheets
Former president, John Mahama, had admitted defeat in the presidential election petition at the Supreme Court.
Speaking at a Professionals Forum in Accra, the 2020 presidential candidate of the party revealed that even though they lost by 7-0 and even 9-0 in other cases, he still does not agree with the ruling.
“In some cases we lost by 7-0 and even 9-0. We asked for a rematch and we lost again. The verdict has ended – we have closed the chapter on the election petition. But we disagree with the ruling,” Mahama stated.
Source: Facebook
Meanwhile, John Dramani Mahama has charged the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to restrategise its election monitoring mechanism.
Speaking at the annual conference of the party’s Professional Forum in Accra on Thursday, Mahama called for the need to deploy astute professionals and educated members of the party to monitor the 2024 general elections.
That, he said will ensure the elections are not stolen.
“We must ensure that we have more professionals and more educated people coming into play in respect of policing and monitoring the elections at the grassroots level,” Mahama, who was the party's presidential candidate in the 2020 general elections urged.
He told members of the forum that the collation of results is an important activity that they can help with.
Still, seething over the Supreme Court’s dismissal of his petition challenging the outcome of the 2020 general elections, the former president took a swipe at the chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC) and the seven-member panel that heard the dismissed petition.
He accused the court of aiding the EC chair to evade accountability after supervising flawed elections.
Mahama said the elections “will go down in history as the profound moment when the Chairperson of the EC opted to evade public scrutiny…”
“Everything was done in this trial to prevent the Commission from accounting to the people in whose name they hold office,” he stated, adding it was a clear stab in the “heart of transparency and accountability to Ghanaians.”
Meanwhile, Justice Gertrude Torkornoo, a member of the seven-member panel that sat on the 2020 election petition, said the Supreme Court expected Mahama to provide pink sheets supporting his allegations of electoral irregularities and lack of a clear winner in the presidential poll.
Mahama petitioned the apex court after rejecting the outcome of the presidential polls.
He argued in his petition that the December 9 declaration by the chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Jean Mensa, that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo won the presidential election was flawed.
The Apex Court, however, dismissed the petition, stating that it cannot order a rerun of the 2020 presidential polls.
The panel held that the former president failed to adduce “cogent evidence” to back his claims that there was no winner in the December 7, 2020, presidential elections.
Commenting for the first time publicly about the judgment, Justice Torkornoo said the petitioner failed in adducing critical evidence to back his case.
“There was a spreadsheet alleging vote padding of 4,693 votes in 26 constituencies and we said we would have expected that the pink sheet for those polling stations would have been exhibited to prove the allegation instead of a spreadsheet,” she stated at a recent forum organised by CODEO, 3news.com reports.
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Source: YEN.com.gh
