The lawyer for the People’s National Congress (PNC), Dr. Raymond Atuguba, has said the Electoral Commission (EC) is being unreasonable with the announcement of new errors in the nomination forms of some previously disqualified presidential aspirants.
According to Dr. Atuguba, the EC has no basis for creating a new set of nomination form errors for the various parties to deal with.
[contextly_sidebar id=”5TMiZcRyPGKkO0sSOwQxKcfaGuw0trDc”]Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, he indicated that if some parties took the matter to court, like the National Democratic Party (NDP) has threatened, the Supreme Court is likely to pass judgement against the EC.
The NDP revealed that, the EC detected 33 new errors on the nomination forms of its presidential aspirant, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings.
The Commission also announced new errors for on the forms of the Progressive People’s Party’s (PPP), Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, hours after the Supreme Court ordered it to allow the 13 disqualified presidential aspirants to correct the errors on their nomination forms by extending the nomination period.
EC shouldn’t have mentioned new errors
Following these developments, Dr. Atuguba opined that “the way in which the court will decide this matter if it came before it was to say that: is it reasonable for the Electoral Commission to create new categories of corrections” The answer there would be no. It is not reasonable for the Electoral Commission to create completely new categories for correction.”
Dr. Atuguba stated that, the reasonable course of action for the EC, is “to stay within the existing categories it had previously pointed out, and to extend the details for those categories.”
He explained further that, “if you create new categories, in other words, you are bringing to the attention of the aspirants completely new matters that were not previously pointed out to them, and which the Supreme Court did not consider in making its judgment, then my calculation is that, the court should strike that down.”
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By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana