No Election Petition In 2016 � Nana Addo

The 2012 Presidential hopeful of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has said he has no desire to lead the elephant family into another election petition in 2016, since that would be an exercise in futility. He has, therefore, urged his fellow �kukrudites� to join him and work towards securing the reforms that are necessary to enhance the integrity of the electoral system as well as staff and other officers of the Electoral Commission of Ghana. �I have no desire to lead the NPP into another election petition in 2016. I certainly do not want to take election grievances to the streets either. I prefer we begin today to do the things that would greatly diminish any potential need to go to court. That means we want an election in which the results would be beyond dispute and would be accepted by all. That means, we must secure the reforms that are necessary to enhance the integrity of the electoral system and the people who work for the system, the electoral officers,� he noted. Nana Addo made this observation, Thursday, when he mounted the podium at his Nima residence in Accra and announced his return to frontline politics, after taking some time off active politics, to reflect on his past and ponder over the future. The NPP, under the leadership of Nana Addo and two others, went to court to challenge the 2012 Presidential election results declared by the Electoral Commission (EC), which saw Mr. John Dramani Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) rising to the number position of the land. The petitioners claimed that there were statutory violations and irregularities during the 2012 Presidential election, as a result of which Mr. John Mahama, the EC and the NDC were respondents in the election petition, filed before the Supreme Court. The petitioners argued that there was over-voting, voting without biometric verification, absence of the signature of the presiding officers, duplicate serial numbers on the pink sheets, duplicate polling station codes, and unknown polling stations. With the above mentioned claims, the petitioners asked the court to annul over 4 million votes, representing votes cast in over 10,000 polling stations across the country, as being the number that had been affected by �gross and widespread irregularities� recorded during the December 2012 poll. But the Supreme Court after analyzing the claims of the petitioners ruled 5:4 in favour of the defendants, thereby, reaffirming the results of the EC, which had declared Mr. Mahama as the President-elect on August 29, 2013. Commenting further, the former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General said the priority of the elephant family in entering into the 2016 general elections was to ensure the integrity of the electoral process to enable them concentrate on what matters most in enhancing the lives of the people.