-NEC hailed for orderliness of polls but…
By Augustine Octavius
Reports from across Liberia say Tuesday’s presidential runoff election has been generally smooth, peaceful and orderly.
But the Elections Coordinating Committee (ECC) has called on the National Elections Commission to immediately launch an investigation into the reported arrest of a voter caught with extra marked ballots.
The ECC called for “respect of the will of the Liberian people.”
A photo of a woman (name not disclosed) arrested with marked ballots went viral on social media on Tuesday after she was reportedly nabbed for reportedly attempting to vote more than once at a precinct in Duport Road, in a Monrovia suburb.
The run-off presidential election is between the incumbent Vice President Joseph Boakai of the governing Unity Party and Montserrado County Senator George Weah of the Coalition for Democratic Change.
Giving a mid-day update at a news conference on Tuesday, ECC Chairman, Attorney Oscar Bloh, said the “sensitive incident has the propensity of undermining the credibility of the run-off election results”.
He added that considering that this allegation is now in public domain, it is equally important that NEC makes the outcome of the investigation public in order to build public trust in the system.
Commenting further, the ECC Chairman called on political parties to refrain from making any premature announcements of results and channel grievances through the appropriate legal framework.
The ECC is also recommending that NEC investigates reports of pre-marked ballots papers and provide timely information on the outcome of its investigation.
The press conference by the ECC was attended by former Nigerian President Good luck Jonathan, head of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) observer mission in Liberia.
On the overall, the Liberian election watchdog (ECC)) reported that “the process is conducted peacefully and orderly with no major incident reported”, adding that queues were better managed compared to the “poor managements” of the first round.
In its first statistical data released, the group reports: “In 98% of polling places where ECC observers are located, observers reported seeing the Final Registration Roll (FRR) and the Record of the Count Forms available at 99% of polling places at 8:00 A.M.
The ECC clarified that its findings do not reflect developments of the day in some parts of Gbarpolu, Nimba, Grand Gedeh and Grand Cape Mount Counties with poor network coverage.
The election monitoring group asserts that “though percentages of polling places observed are not statistically representative of the entire country, they do provide credible data on emerging national trends”.
The Elections Coordinating Committee is a civil society platform comprising 30 organizations that observe all aspects of the elections in Liberia.