-As Urey’s ALP complains over low votes from NEC results
By our Reporter
National Police have arrested and charged a local poll worker for attempted ballot stuffing in Liberia’s northeastern Nimba County, the National Elections Commission (NEC) has disclosed.
Josephus cooper, an elections officer in charge of one of the polling centers in Nimba was allegedly caught red handed trying to put extra ballot papers into the ballot box after the October 10 polls had closed.
He’s expected to be prosecuted in court shortly.
As a result, the NEC Chairman Jerome Korkoya told Journalists Saturday that results from the affected precinct were being excluded. And a rerun for that particular polling place in Dulay is set for Tuesday, October 17, 2017.
Some election observers and media outlets in Liberia described that act as “an isolated incident”.
NEC has also scheduled a fresh round of voting for another District number 4 in the same Nimba County where there were some lapses that affected polling on election day.
At the same time, the national electoral body says it has received the first official complaint on the conduct of last Tuesday’s polls from one of the 20 presidential candidates, Banoni Urey and his All Liberian Party (ALP).
According to NEC Chairman Korkoya, Urey–a one-time head of the Maritime Bureau under ex-President Charles Taylor—questioned the very low voting figures coming out for him from provisional results being released by the electoral commission.
In his protest, Urey claimed that his ALP party was very popular in several counties including Bong and wondered why NEC’s provisional results would show he has so far performed poorly.
In the third provisional results released by NEC on Saturday, Urey’s ALP got just 17,796 votes or 1.6% of the million 193 thousand votes which have so far been tallied from the 3, 991 polling places. So far, 74% of the 5,390 polling places are already in.
Before forming his ALP, Urey broke ranks with Geroge Weah’s CDC. Earlier, he had been an executive member of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Party (NPP).
The NPP was one of three parties—Congress for Democratic Change and the People’s Democratic Party of Liberia (PDPL) of former House Speaker Alex Tyler—who merged into the Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) before the October 10 polls.