The petitioners in the ongoing Presidential Election Petition have reiterated the constitutional requirement that only valid votes gets counted in an election and the power of the Court to annul invalid/ unlawful votes in order for a declaration to be made on only the valid votes. This is contained in the 176 paged address of the petitioners filed a week ago.
In dealing with “The Legal Effect of the Constitutional and Statutory Violations, Malpractices and Irregularities”, the petitioners stated that “the manner in which the Constitution has formulated the basis on which a person may be deemed to be elected President is a pointer to the fact that the Constitution itself envisages that it is only valid votes cast at an election, which must be counted.
Article 63(3), which is material for this purpose, stipulates thus: “A person shall not be elected as President of Ghana unless at the presidential election the number of votes cast in his favour is more than fifty percent of the total number of valid votes cast at the election.”
The petitioners submitted that the Constitution itself, by this provision, recognises that in an election there shall be valid votes and invalid votes. This provision, according to the petitioners, clearly empowers the Electoral Commission to take into account in the declaration of a person as President of Ghana only valid or lawful votes and mandates it to disregard unlawful or invalid votes.
The petitioners noted “that the Constitution does not indicate the number of people who must vote in a presidential election before the legality of the election of a person as President will be upheld. Neither does it specify the quantum of votes in relation to the population of the country that a person must obtain before he can become President.”
Unlike provisions for a referendum with respect to entrenched provisions in the constitution where there is a specific threshold of votes which must be attained, in the case of the election of a president “all that the Constitution is concerned about is that, the person so elected has obtained more than 50% of the valid votes cast”, the petitioners said.
The address reminded the Honorable Court of its “duty to uphold the integrity of elections only in polling stations where the results of the elections have not been affected by violations, malpractices and irregularities” since a valid mandate for the person occupying the office of the President is an integral bedrock of Ghana’s constitutional democracy.
“It is respectfully further submitted that a ‘valid vote’ is a vote cast in accordance with the mandatory regulations affecting elections or lawful instructions issued to all registered voters in advance of the elections. For a vote to be valid, a person who has the right to vote must first cast it. Article 42 of the 1992 Constitution does not only give every citizen of Ghana of eighteen years of age or above and of sound mind the right to vote but also an entitlement to “be registered as a voter for the purposes of public elections and referenda. The requirement that a voter must be first registered to vote is a constitutional imperative. The Constitution has, therefore, connected the registration requirement genetically to the right to vote; so it is a requirement for the right to vote and not a limitation of the right. That requirement in itself requires certain processes to be in place to realise it and the mandatory use of a Biometric Verification Device is what the nation has agreed, by way of a constitutional instrument properly enacted, to be the current enhancing method of realising that right to vote statutorily prescribed by Regulation 30 (2) of C. I. 75.”, the address said.
The petitioners summarized the following elements of an invalid vote;
