‘Let no one assume NDC will accept flawed election results’ – Mahama

The 2020 NDC flagbearer, John Dramani Mahama, has warned the party may reject the 2020 election results if it is flawed.

Mr. Mahama served the notice after a new electoral regulation, excluding the old voter ID cards, came into force Tuesday.

The Constitutional Instrument 261, laid before parliament, matured after 21 days and is now regulation.

The exclusion means that during the new voter’s registration exercise, a person would have to prove his Ghanaian citizenship using a less popular ID, passport; or the new Ghana card, which is yet to be issued out nationwide.

Otherwise, a person would need two Ghanaians to vouch for their citizenship, the EC new regulations say.

It’s official: Existing voter’s ID card excluded from 2020 elections

But for months, the main opposition NDC has been condemning the new proof of citizenship regulation. After several demonstrations, the NDC has gone to court to challenge the Electoral Commission’s decision.

Reacting to the new regulation for the 2020 voter registration exercise, the NDC Presidential candidate, John Mahama, expressed disappointment in the Electoral Commission’s decision.

“Let nobody attempt to disenfranchise any of our ethnic groups on the basis of citizenship because we are a diverse nation but we are united in our diversity” he stressed the NDC’s concern,” he said at a ceremony to mark the 28th anniversary of the party in Accra.

The NDC had raised alarms in the recent past that millions of people in its strongholds could be disenfranchised by the EC’s decision.

On  Tuesday, a group of more than 100 lecturers, some with NDC ties, also warned that the EC’s decision could deny more than nine million people the right to vote.

To provide a sustainable antidote, Mr Mahama said a future NDC government would end the recurring need to compile a new voter’s register at the pleasure of the Electoral Commission.

“We will invest all resources to ensure we don’t need to compile a fresh register”, he said.

The former President backed the Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu’s, vow to ensure that any eligible voter would be empowered to get a card at any time.

John Mahama then charged the party’s grassroots to be vigilant during the 2020 polls in December and to “police the poll right from the point of voting”.

“No ballot box will go out of our sight” he charged.

Mahama also assured Ghanaians that as an opposition party, “we shall do all our best to ensure the elections will remain peaceful.”

He expressed confidence that the NDC is bound to win the 2020 general elections and form the next government.

“If the election is free and fair, there can be no outcome other than the NDC emerging victorious in this elections”, he said.

Mahama explained that the NDC has a track record of accepting credible election results since it was established in 1992. The NDC has lost three elections in 2000, 2004 and 2016 and won in 1992, 2008 and 2012.

“But there is a big but,” he said and served notice that the posture of the party in accepting election results should not be taken for granted.

“Let nobody assume that we will accept the results of flawed elections,” he said.

Mahama’s comment is expected to revive the controversy surrounding the 2012 presidential elections which the NPP, then in opposition, rejected.

The incumbent president John Mahama was declared winner of the presidential contest with 50.7% of the vote, just a few thousand votes over the threshold for avoiding a run-off election. Nana Akufo-Addo received 47.74%.

“The position of the National Executive Council of the NPP is that we refuse to accept the results,” he said on December 12, 2012.

Speaking to a large crowd of NPP supporters at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle in Accra, the NPP Flag Bearer said “we would contest the results at the Supreme court.

The NPP did go ahead with a legal challenge and a nine-month election petition hearing ended with the Supreme Court backing the eventual winner, John Dramani Mahama.

John Mahama’s comment insisting the NDC would be the eventual winner of a free and fair elections is likely to court controversy.

It is a rhetoric often used by parties in opposition.

In December 2010, NPP flagbearer for the 2012 presidential elections, Nana Akufo-Addo said “we have to win that battle. The welfare of our nation demands. We dare not contemplate any other outcome.”

A year later, in November 2011, Akufo-Addo addressing students of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) branch of the NPP said;

“The world was never built by people of little vision and little imagination, the world belongs to those who can think big, act big and do big things and for that to happen the only political force in our country that can bring about this transformation and change is the New Patriotic Party.There is no other party that can do it. At all cost we should win the election of 2012.”

Ghana operates a winner-takes-all political system which has been criticised as fueling electoral tension. A presidential candidate has to gain a 50% plus 1 vote to be declared winner.

It gives the loser with nothing while the winning party shares of spoils of victory among themselves.