–Weah’s CDC 39%, Boakai’s UP 29%
By our Staff Reporter
With 95.6% of Liberia’s October 10 presidential election polling places in, a runoff is imminent, amidst a huge number of invalid votes totaling over 80,000.
Announcing the fourth provisional results on Sunday, the Chairman of the National Elections Commission, Jerome Korkoya said nearly 96% of the 5,380 polling places have been tallied representing over 1.5 million 55-thousand votes. Invalid votes occur due to error of the voter in appropriately marking the ballots. For example, a voter places check marks against the names of two candidates, whereas the X or check mark or thumb print should only be placed against the candidate of the voter’s choice.
So far, George Weah’s Coalition of Democratic Change (CDC) has got 572,453 votes accounting for 39%, while current Vice President Joseph Boakai of the ruling Unity Party (UP) picked up 427,550 vote representing 29.1%.
With less than five percent of the results to be tallied, it is now increasingly unlikely that any of the candidate will manage to get the constitutionally required 50% plus one vote absolute majority required to get a first round victory.
But NEC, which is the only institution with the authority to declared a winner, says it will release further results later when the rest of the results from last Tuesday’s polls are in.
Since polling day, both the main opposition CDC and the ruling UP have said they were curtained of a first round victory, something that now seems increasingly unlikely.
Any eventual second round vote is set for November 8, 2017.
Sunday’s results released by NEC puts Liberty Party (LP) presidential candidate Charles Brumskine in the third place with 144,359votes representing 9.8%. Brumskine has since described the October 10 polls as invalid” due to alleged fraud has called for a rerun of the polls.
In the official results, his LP is followed by Alexander Cummings Alternative National Congress (ANC) which has collected 102,564 votes and closely followed by former warlord now Senator Prince Johnson who go 102,564 votes accounting for 7.0%.
In the last election in 2011, Johnson came third in the first round and later gave his support to outgoing President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s UP in the runoff.