The National Democratic Congress (NDC) parliamentary candidate for the Assin North by-election, James Gyakye Quayson, has been declared winner of the Tuesday, June 27, 2023 polls.
Mr. Quayson won with 17,245 votes, representing 57.56 percent of the total votes cast, defeating Charles Opoku of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and Bernice Enyonam Sefenu of the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG).
Charles Opoku received 12,630 votes, accounting for 42.15 percent of the votes cast in the highly contested by-election, while the LPG’s Bernice Enyonam Sefenu received only 87 votes (0.29%).
Gyakye Quayson, who received 17,498 votes in the 2020 election, was booted out of Parliament for possessing dual citizenship prior to filing his nomination documents.
The Assin North seat was declared vacant after the Supreme Court decided on May 17 that Gyakye Quayson’s name be removed from Parliament’s records.
The Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Quayson was not qualified to contest the 2020 parliamentary elections in the Assin North Constituency at the time he filed his nomination forms on October 9, 2020.
The Court found that Mr. Quayson had not shown evidence of renouncing his Canadian citizenship, and that the Electoral Commission had granted him permission to contest the election without this evidence.
The Court further ruled that Mr. Quayson’s election as Member of Parliament for Assin North Constituency was unconstitutional.
The 7-member Court in a unanimous ruling stated that “the qualification of holding only Ghanaian citizenship must be present at the time of nomination, and not any date thereafter.”
The Court also held that “any person, who has obtained citizenship of another country other than Ghana, and who files for nomination with the Electoral Commission to contest for election as a Member of Parliament will not be qualified to contest for elections unless and until they show a record from the alternate State that they no longer hold the citizenship of that State as at the date of filing their nominations with the Electoral Commission.”
