Implications of SC Ruling: All signatures don’t matter

Almost a month after the Supreme Court delivered its verdict on the landmark election petition case, it appears not many are convinced about some of the positions taken by the judges in their final ruling, particularly issues relating to the absence of Presiding Officers’ signatures on pink sheets.

All the judges on the majority side, in effect, ruled that absent of signatures of Presiding Officers on pinks sheets should not in any way be used to annul votes of innocent individuals whose right to vote are guaranteed by the Constitution.

The view taken by the judges is seen as a dangerous precedent since it implies that signatures in general may not matter after all in other areas such as marriage certificates and other valid documents.

No wonder this has prompted some respected lawyers in the country to make serious comments on this worrying development. One of such lawyers is Professor Kofi Kumado of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ghana.

In a letter published in the Daily Guide last Friday, the good Professor posed two thought-provoking questions:

“What is the value in the law of a marriage certificate which is signed by the couple and their witnesses, but is not signed by the registrar or the celebrating pastor?”

“The second question is: As a law teacher, how do you extract teaching materials for your students from a judgement based on the feelings of the judge?”

Professor Kumado’s questions, even though brief, are very loaded as they easily drum home the point that the majority’s take on the absence of signatures of Presiding Officers have far-reaching negative consequences when viewed and scrutinised critically.

For the benefit of our readers, we published below excerpts of Justice Gbadegbe’s submission on absence of Signatures of Presiding officers:

“The interpretation of Article 49 of the Constitution that has been urged on us in these proceedings does not commend itself to me. That interpretation seeks to constitute Presiding Officers into a special class of actors in the electoral process.”

“I am unable to understand that although they actually presided over the elections and the counting of the ballots and caused polling agents to sign the declaration of the results, which they thereafter openly announced to the public and had a copy thereof posted at the polling station, by merely not signing the results sheets,…. the entire process should be invalidated.”

“Therefore, in my thinking, a mere breach of a constitutional provision does not by itself result in invalidating an election, but it must be proved of the said non-compliance that it has materially affected the declared result at the election.”

“The procedural approach that is urged on us by the petitioners does not commend itself to me and I prefer to adopt the substantive approach in a matter that touches and concerns no mean a right as the right to vote.

“Perhaps, because our electoral history has not had the experience of other jurisdictions where for several years a certain section of the population was not entitled to vote, we tend to take its conferment on us, as a people, lightly.”

“In my view, if such an interpretation could be given, regarding the exercise by the legislature of a power conferred on it under the constitution to make laws on behalf of the sovereign people of the United States of America, then by parity of reasoning as regards merely administrative acts such as the failure to sign pink sheets that do not raise any issue that calls into question the totality of votes declared at a polling station, such a failure cannot operate to deprive the declared results of validity.”

The respected judge further submitted, “I think to accede to this urging would be subversive of the right to vote and treating its exercise as not being as important as the breach to which the absence of signatures relate. The right to vote according to one’s choice is in my opinion the fundamental pillar of our constitutional democracy and should not be trivialised.”