Full text of Quarshie Idun oral address to the Supreme Court Judges on the 2012 election petition Quarshie Idun in his submission referred to Bawumia’s testimony that the party after the first day of voting which is 7th December 2012, thought they were winning. He quotes from his testimony and adds that Bawumia claims that everthing changed after 8th December He quotes further from Bawumia’s testimony that after he was questioned whether the basis of his party’s confidence of winning on the first day was based on pink sheets? But in Bawumia’s answer he says they were based on assessments from their polling agents across the country. Idun asks a rhetorical question: What changed after the first day? He says Bawumia couldn’t tell the court what exactly changed. But he, Idun says nothing changed. The votes were still being counted openly after the close of poll. This he says is the first level of verification. The results were then taken to the collation center – second level of verification. The third level of verification was in the strong room where everything was checked by the accredited agents of all parties. Quarshie-Idun tells your Lorship to consider the importance of counting the ballots in public – because it is a key pillar of transparency. Your Lordships should be skeptical about calls for annulment because of errors in inputing votes on the pink sheets. James Quarshie-Idun refers to some questions that Addison on 15th July posed to the E.C during cross-examination. He recalls how E.C said he led a team of experts to review Nigeria’s flawed 2011 electoral process and made extensive recommendations to the Nigerian authorities. One of them was that the Independent Nigeria Electoral Commission(INEC) should be reconstituted because of the clear lack of confidence in INEC. Addison then asked if he would recommend this to Ghana’s sytem. But Afari-Gyan responded that “we have a very very good, transparent, firm and tested electoral system”. He said there are many countries who would like to emulate Ghana’s system Addison also read out another recommendation in which “INEC should be transparent in its work, by providing full information to election stakeholders in easily accessible formats” To which Afari Gyan replied that Ghana already had such a system and that in many places the level of transparency is very high. Afari-Gyan added that there are places where political party agents do not know where the printing of ballot papers were done or the calculation used in printing ballots. Agents are also not allowed during registration exercises. But in Ghana we are able to know in court what happened months ago in Bubuashie. In the final recommendations Addison read out that “a major area of concern has been a lack of transparency and verifiability in the results process. The counting of votes, and the transmission and tabulation of results must be transparent and conducted in strict compliance with the electoral law” and that copies of results should be given to party agents for greater transparency. This, Afari gyan said the recommendations were literally recommending Ghana to Nigeria Quarshie-Idun then says that the Petitioners all throughout the hearing have not questioned the process of verifiability of Ghana’s electoral system. He says there is 24 hour surveillance by all party agents in the printing ballot papers which is also traced while it is transported to every center. Idun says the six categories of irregularities presented by petitioners, have not established the causal likn between those allegations and results declared by E.C. He says out of that large number of 26,000 polling stations, only one example of discrepancy between votes counted at the polling station and collation center. He says that this discrepancy is 80 votes where instead of writing 97 votes, the presiding officer wrote just 17. This he says had no effect on the results. He accuses Addison of misrepresenting the testimony of his client Dr. Kwadwo Afari Gyan when Addison claims that the electoral officers forgot to bring Form 1C to the voting center and so could not enter results for column C3. Addison also called it a white lie for Afari Gyan to claim to have told polling agents to enter zero when polling agents actually filled it. It is a misrepresentation of Afrai Gyan’s evidence, Idun says.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 14:00:41 +0000
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