Did Papa Owusu Ankomah Vote Without Verification?

Ask Margaret Jackson

February 28, 2013

The double standards that have been exhibited by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the unrepentant sore loser of the 2012 Presidential Election, are beginning to catch up with him. Akufo-Addo, after going through the pink results sheets from the 26,002 polling stations cunningly decided to raise red flags in only polling stations won by President John Mahama.

Nana Akufo-Addo, who perhaps never thought that anybody will do due diligence and expose him on his duplicity, rushed to the Supreme Court with a litany of allegations ranging from over voting, voting without verification, duplication of serial numbers and unsigned sheets by presiding officers among others.

In something that can be classified as a made-to-believe-movie, Akufo-Addo has been crying all over the corridors of the Supreme Court that President Mahama aided the Electoral Commission (EC) to rob him of victory. This is the most terrible seed of lie that Akufo-Addo has successfully sown into the minds of the NPP supporters who for some reason/s have refused to go beyond what they have been told by the NPP leadership to fish out the truth.

Nana Akufo-Addo and his cohorts are always in the news claiming that their trove of information concerning their supposed irregularities is mind blowing, but they have flatly refused to inform Ghanaians that we have these same normal errors by the EC officials in polling stations also won by Akufo-Addo.

Today, we will concentrate on the polling station that the NPP MP for Sekondi, Papa Owusu Ankomah, voted at during the 2012 elections. Papa Owusu Ankomah voted at the Near Clerk Quarters polling station with the polling code of A070201. The number of eligible voters was 252 but on the voting day, we had 213 people including Papa Owusu Ankomah going to the polling station to exercise their vote.

If you look on the pink results sheet on Section C3 at the Near Clerk Quarters, the presiding officer, Ms Ophelia Egyir-Sey, stated that the number of people who voted without verification were also 213. Can we therefore, conclude that Papa Owusu Ankomah after he has voted with verification, later returned and voted without verification? If yes, then it means that Papa Owusu Ankomah voted twice on Election Day at the Near Clerk Quarters polling station.

But if you are good at math or you don’t attempt to be mischievous, you will not need anybody’s prompting to notice that Ms Egyir-Sey simply made an entry error by stating that 213 people voted without verification.

This is an incident Nana Akufo-Addo would have seriously called into question if it had happened in a polling station that President Mahama won, but because he won by 145 votes as against President Mahama’s of 62, it was not part of the issue Akufo-Addo raised with the Supreme Court. This is the duplicity that I have been talking about.

If there is an entry error in a polling station that Akufo-Addo won, this man is okay with it, but he has selectively raised issues in all the polling stations with the same kind of entry errors won by President Mahama.

In fairness to all, there is this saying that what has always been good for the goose is good for the gander. Perhaps Akufo-Addo in his anxiety to jump over heads and land at the presidency wants a short-cut without recourse to fairness. That is why we have Akufo-Addo calling on the Supreme Court to throw away 4.6 million valid votes by people who queued for hours under the sweltering sun to exercise their franchise on Election Day, so that he will be crowned the President of the land.

If Akufo-Addo wants the votes of people in polling stations that President Mahama won to be thrown away because of these simple entry errors which did not have any bearing on the number of votes won by each of the presidential candidates, then fairness calls for votes won by him in polling stations with the same kind of errors to be also thrown away.

Akufo-Addo cannot ask the Supreme Court to disenfranchise voters in polling stations President Mahama won and leave the polling stations that he won intact. This will be the highest travesty of justice and the highest insult to Ghanaians.

Never again should Ghanaians sit by and watch whilst one person pursues his ill-fated political agenda at the expense of the majority. Ghanaians spoke very loud and clear on Election Day by voting for President Mahama. Akufo-Addo, therefore, cannot change the will of the people through this political manoeuvring.

Trust me, the millions of NDC supporters who voted for President Mahama will never sit down as zombies for the Supreme Court to overturn the results in favour of Akufo-Addo.

I will urge readers to digest this article and brainstorm with those who have ears for the truth till they hear from me again.

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