A Supreme Court judge, Gertrude Torkonoo has justified the verdict by the apex court on the 2020 election petition presented by the 2020 flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama.

According to her, the court's calculation on the electoral figures proved that Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC) Jean Mensa, only made an error during her declaration and not the entire outcomes of the result.

"The issue was whether or not based on the data, the data in the declaration of the first respondent [Jean Mensa] the second respondent [Akufo-Addo] got more than 50%. There is no doubt that in providing the particulars of the first respondent, the chairperson announced the figure 13,434,504 when she was referring to the total valid vote cast which was actually 13,121,111 so the video sent to us shows that she had said that after she had listed all the valid votes for each candidate she had said on the premise of the total vote cast these people got these percentages.

"But evidence shows that after she had detected the error in announcing the figure of 13,434,505 as the total valid vote the error was corrected the next day in a press release," she added.  

Justice Torkonoo made this revelation during a forum to review the 2020 general elections and its aftermath on Wednesday.

Jean Mensa made some corrections on the total valid votes after her declaration of the 2020 results on December 9.

According to her, she declared the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Nana Akufo-Addo as the President-elect based on a total of 13,433,573 valid votes instead of 13,119,460.

However, Mahama who filed an election petition argued that no candidate garnered more than 50% of the votes cast.

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court justice opined that the error made by the chairperson did not affect the figures which saw the Presidential candidate of the NPP victorious.

She said, President Akufo-Addo got more than 50% of the votes cast.

Her Ladyship Getrude Torkonoo further added that the allegation of vote peddling by the petitioner should have been argued in court with evidence. 

 She noted that Mr. John Mahama was expected to prove his allegations of vote padding with pink sheets and not spreadsheets.

“Some allegation had been put in the petition about vote padding and it was supposed to concern 5662 votes in 32 constituencies. But, on Exhibition brought to court, there was a spreadsheet alleging vote padding of 4693 votes in 26 constituencies. So we said we would have expected that the pink sheet of those polling stations could have been exhibited to prove the allegations instead of a spreadsheet.”

The Apex Court in March this year dismissed the election petition filed by Jihn Mahama saying he had failed to prove that no candidate got more than 50% of the votes cast.

The verdict which did not sit well with Mr. Mahama launched a scathing attack on the judgement.