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Oral arguments would be presented tomorrow by the litigants in the 2012 presidential elections petition, for and against the annulments of votes in respect of allegation of violations, omission, irregularities and malpractices which occurred in the 2012 December 7 and 8 elections in favour of President John Mahama. They were granted the permission on July 31, after both the petitioners and respondents, minus the National Democratic Congress (NDC), met the court�s deadline of July 30. The court, presided over by Justice William Atuguba, would give a date for judgment, after the parties have delivered their addresses. The allegations of violations, omission, irregularities and malpractices, including people voting without the Biometric Verification Devices (BVD), over voting, some presiding officers not signing the statement of poll and declaration of results form for the Office of President (pink sheet) and some pink sheets having duplicate serial numbers. With the exception of the NDC, the petitioners, the President and the Electoral Commission (EC) complied with the court�s July 17, 2013 orders to file their written addresses by July 30, 2013. However the NDC filed its written addresses in the morning July 31, 2013. The NDC�s counsel had explained that mechanical challenges in binding the address which consisted of 10 appendices resulted in the late filing. The court, after ruling on the issue, allotted the parties 30 minutes each for clarification and necessary additions and the mode of the addresses decided on the said date. According to the petitioners, President Mahama benefited from 2, 612,788 votes while Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, presidential candidate for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) polled 1, 228,229 voters for the said violation and irregularities. They claim Nana Akufo-Addo won the election by 59.6 percent while President Mahama polled 39.1 percent. The respondents have disproved the claims of the petitioners that there were triplicate and quadruplicate numbers on some pink sheet. The issue of duplicate serial numbers on some pink sheets has been conceded by the EC. The petitioners had indicated to the court that they filed and relied on 10,119 pink sheets which had resulted in the four main statutory violations while the respondents failed to file any pink sheet to disprove the case of the petitioners. They insisted that evidence had been adduced during the trial that there had been substantial irregularities in the 2012 presidential elections which had material effect on the results of the elections declared by the EC. However, the legal team of President Mahama had maintained that the petitioners had woefully failed to prove their allegations since there were no protest by neither polling agents nor voters at the various polling stations. On allegations of voting without BVD, the legal team of President Mahama indicated that the petitioners had not been able to prove that people voted at the various polling stations without using the device and that for refusing to lead evidence that over-voting occurred at polling stations, the petitioners had been unable to prove their case. Touching on an absence of no signatures of presiding officers on pink sheets, the legal team of President Mahama argued that the petitioners had not been able to prove that failure to sign affected the result. On duplicate serial numbers on ballot papers, the petitioners claimed ignorance of the requirement of serial numbers on ballot papers. The EC, on the other hand, contended that the petitioners had failed to establish that irregularities occurred in the 2012 presidential election affected the results. It submitted that the key witness of the respondents, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the chairman of the EC, admitted in his evidence-in-chief that it was an obligation of presiding officers to sign which the EC considered acceptable for purposes of declaration of the results. The NDC, on the its part, submitted that annulment of votes would not only be an unconstitutional deprivation of the right to vote of the citizenry but would also amount to punishing innocent voters due to the negligence of presiding officers and prayed the court to dismiss the petitioners claims that there were statutory violations and irregularities in the 2012 presidential elections.