Politics of Sunday, 14 March 2021

Source: www.ghanaweb.com

Election 2020: No candidate got 50% - Tsatsu Tsikata insists

Lawyer Tsatsu Tsikata play videoLawyer Tsatsu Tsikata

Tsatsu Tsikata insists that the Presidential Election 2020 did not produce any winner because none of the candidates that contested the elections crossed the 50% threshold as stipulated in the constitution.

According to Tsikata, speaking on the KSM Show last Friday, the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, knowing that none of the candidates won the election, went ahead to declare the NPP candidate winner, something that is very problematic and a bad precedence for the country.

Tsikata stated: “Fundamentally, what I think is most problematic about the judgement is that, we have a situation in this country now where if you base yourself on the Declaration that was made by the Chairperson […] there was not a constitutionally valid Declaration because no candidate got 50%.

“Mr Nana Akufo-Addo got 49.625% based on the numbers that she herself had announced. Now what the court then said was that, the next day, there [were] some corrections issued by the EC but those corrections were not by the Chairperson [Returning Officer]; they were unsigned press releases. Even more important, the numbers in those corrections were different from the numbers on which the court was basing itself as the results of the election.”

But the only person who could have responded to those inconsistencies, that is the Chairperson of the EC, who refused to mount the witness box.

John Dramani Mahama filed a Petition to challenge the Declaration of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as President-elect in the December 7, 2020, Presidential election.

He was praying to the court to order a rerun of the election because the NPP flagbearer did not cross the 50% threshold as stipulated by the constitution, but the Supreme Court dismissed the case stating that it lacked merit.