The High Court has clarified the basis for its decision to order a complete rerun of the Kpandai Parliamentary election, stating that the scale of irregularities uncovered during the trial made it impossible to limit the remedy to only the 41 disputed polling stations.

Delivering the judgment, Justice Manuel Bart-Plange Brew said the inconsistencies found in the pink sheets presented by both parties were so widespread and fundamental that they “went to the roots of the results,” undermining the credibility of the entire constituency tally.

According to the judge, evidence before the court showed numerical discrepancies, conflicting tallies, illegible figures, unexplained cancellations, and mismatches between the Electoral Commission’s (EC) pink sheets and those held by the petitioner.

In one instance, a pink sheet recorded 1,422 votes in a column that had no corresponding figures, while at Kpalung Primary School, the EC’s record showed 261 votes in a slot where the petitioner’s copy listed 325.

Justice Brew noted that if such errors were present in the 41 pink sheets examined during proceedings, the court had “no way of knowing” whether the remaining 111 polling stations—whose documents were not tendered—were free from similar problems.

The ruling has faced criticism from the New Patriotic Party (NPP), with members of the Minority in Parliament questioning how a petition concerning 41 polling stations resulted in a directive to rerun the election across all 150 polling stations in the constituency.

However, the court argued that the situation was compounded by the loss, destruction, or unavailability of key electoral materials, including BVD machines and original collation documents, which made cross-verification impossible. Justice Brew further described some of the EC’s documents as “tainted,” citing interpolations, heavy ink markings, cancellations, and inconsistent handwriting that rendered the records unreliable.

Procedural concerns during collation also informed the ruling.

The court pointed to the relocation of the collation centre to Tamale without notice to the petitioner, conflicting accounts of when violence disrupted the process, and the absence of key officials at critical points in the tallying.

Justice Brew emphasised that discrepancies involving hundreds of votes cannot be dismissed as minor, stating that electoral justice cannot accommodate fundamental arithmetic errors, especially from a constitutionally mandated institution like the EC.

“The pink sheet recordings raise substantial questions as to what has happened,” he wrote, adding that the court could not “whitewash” the inconsistencies or assume that unexamined polling stations were problem-free.

He concluded that given the incomplete, inconsistent, and unreliable nature of the documentation, the only lawful and fair remedy was to order a full constituency-wide rerun of the Kpandai Parliamentary election.