The presidential candidate for the opposition National Democratic Congress, John Mahama, is calling for an independent forensic investigation into the just ended December 7, election results.
According to him, the conclusion of the inquiry will determine the opposition party’s next move.
“With the incompetence, the EC has shown, it will be useful for us to do a forensic audit of the EC’s own systems and numbers to come to what the final number from the EC is,” Mr. Mahama stated in an exclusive interview with VOA’s Peter Clottey.
“ Unfortunately this election, she can’t even get the results right. The declaration is all over the place,” he added.
Mahama’s comment comes after the electoral commission declared incumbent President Nana Akufo-Addo, winner of the presidential poll with 51 percent of the vote ahead of Mahama’s 47 percent.
The credibility of the results issued by the electoral commissioner has also been queried by some observers following the revision of the total valid votes declared by the EC on December 9, 2020, of which EC Chairperson, Jean Mensa, announced wrong figures, while the ones’ they ensue after also contains some numerical errors.
Concurrently, the “NDC is doing forensic audit of the presidential pink sheets in all constituencies to ascertain what happened and to reconfirm the figures we have, he revealed.
Even though Mr. Mahama primarily became the first incumbent to lose an election in Ghana and later conceded, he said the lapses his party has noted cannot be overlooked.
“In the interest of more than 6m people who voted for me i must uphold our democracy and hold our Electoral Commission to a higher standards and hold this government to a higher standard in terms our democracy. The way they have conducted this election; the government, President Akufo-Addo and the Electoral Commission, is a dent to our democratic credentials”, he remarked.
Stressing that, the audit is necessary to “bring closure to this by seeing exactly where the issues are.”
He, withal, that if the independent audit done by the EC is up to the mark, “I’ll be the first to concede and walk away.”
“As long as that is not done and we know there was a deliberate attempt to subvert the will of the people in favour of the incumbent, it will be wrong for me to just leave it because we will not learn the lessons of this election”.
The electoral commission must learn from the errors it committed to ensure they are never repeated in future polls, Mahama opined.
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