It is illegitimate for the Electoral Commission (EC) to audit pink sheets containing results of the December 7 presidential and parliamentary elections on grounds of over-voting, Kweku Asare, a US-based Ghanaian professor, has said.

The EC has indicated that there have been some cases of over-voting in some of the polling stations, a situation which requires that result slips (pink sheets) of the polls are audited.

But reacting to this in a Facebook post, Prof Asare said: “After the needless controversy that greeted the EC's unlawful disqualification of some presidential candidates, it is, indeed, shocking that the commission has chosen to embark on another illegal journey to audit the so-called over-voting.”

“The law on counting and collating results decentralises the process to reduce the risk of manipulation at a central location. Notwithstanding the clarity of this law, it was only a few days ago that the Chairman of the EC signalled that she will order a recount of the results if the election outcome is ‘close’, contrary to law.

“Now that it is apparent the election outcome was not ‘close’, the commission has now arrogated to itself the power to conceal the results from Ghanaians, audit results properly declared at the polling stations, declare an unspecified number of these results as tainted by over-voting and release results in a piecemeal fashion that has resulted in declaration from only 50 constituencies in the last 20 hours.

“We believe the EC is not only acting unlawfully but it is also needlessly raising the political temperature in the country. We call on the EC to immediately post the polling station results on its website to reduce the political temperature. In addition, it should disembark from its illegal journey to the land of over-voting.

“The election results are what they are and they should be released just as they came from the polling stations without any glosses.”