NPP General Secretary, Justin Frimpong Kodua, says the Electoral Commission (EC)’s decision to rerun the Ablekuma North parliamentary election is illegal.

He insists that the court’s order was strictly for collation, not a fresh vote.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express on Tuesday, July 8, Kodua maintained that the party would not participate in the EC’s “unlawful” rerun scheduled for July 11, 2025.

“The Court made an explicit pronouncement that EC, we are giving you an order of mandamus – go and collate the outstanding polling stations and declare the results. The court never said, go and do a rerun,” he said.

Mr Kodua explained that the NPP had already scanned all 281 pink sheets from polling stations and independently collated results showing their candidate leading with 34,613 votes against the NDC candidate’s 34,199 – a margin of 414 votes.

“We were very sure,” he said until the chaos that erupted at the coalition centre disrupted the process.

The NPP says that chaos led to ballot papers being burnt, pink sheets torn, and Electoral Commission officers being attacked and dragged away from the collation centre.

At that moment, according to Mr Kodua, “the Electoral Commission didn’t even have some of their pink sheets because they were destroyed.”

He revealed that the EC eventually relied on scanned copies of the NPP’s pink sheets to attempt collation for some polling stations.

“Some of our pink sheets are with the Electoral Commission because they relied on it, and they wanted to keep it for the record,” he said.

Evans Mensah, host of PM Express, questioned whether the NPP, being in power then, should not take responsibility for the failure to secure the collation process.

Mr Kodua deflected: “That is why it’s important that our institutions are supposed to be impartial. That’s why it’s important our institutions are supposed to be professional.”

He questioned whether the police’s failure to provide security was a deliberate act by the current government.

“So are you trying to tell me that the reason why the police failed to provide security… was because they were working under the behest of this government? Is it deliberate?”

Mr Kodua then returned to the legal basis for the party’s stance. “We are in court, and the EC has been cited for contempt,” he said.

“The directive from the court was explicit… You cannot vary the order of the court.” He added that if the EC had any concerns with enforcing the court’s directive, it should have returned to the court for clarification or a variation – not unilaterally decide to conduct a rerun.

He described the EC’s current path as “a bad precedent for this country” and reiterated that any move toward a rerun after an election must come from a court of competent jurisdiction, not from the Electoral Commission itself.

As tensions rise ahead of the July 11 date, the NPP’s position is clear: this is not a rerun, it’s a matter of collation, and anything else is contempt of court.