GOVERNORSHIP elections in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States may have to be re-held after documents published by the Independent National Electoral Commission (Inec) showed that the numbers of votes recorded were about five times the number of registered voters.
According to figures recently published, while Inec announced the People's Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate Nyesom Wike, as the winner of the April 11, poll with 1,029,102 votes, only 292,878 voters were accredited for the election in the state. According to the All Progressives Congress (APC), this shows that Mr Wike got almost four times as many votes as the number of registered voters.
However, Samuel Nwanosike, the publicity secretary of the Rivers State chapter of the PDP, accused the APC of sponsoring reports against his party. He explained that the the PDP would not panic, adding that the party would emerge victorious at the election tribunal.
Mr Nwanosike said: “What makes up accredited voters are those cards that were verified, authenticated and those that were verified and not authenticated. If the card is verified and authenticated, it would read in the machine as being successful.
“If a card is verified as an Inec card and it is not authenticated, it would show red and it would decline. At that point, Inec said one should use the incident form to accredit the person and a lot of such incidents happened and people used incident forms to get accredited and vote.”
However, Chris Finebone, the publicity secretary of the Rivers State chapter of the APC dismissed the PDP’s claim that the report was false, adding that his party decided not to immediately put the information on the conflicting figures in the state in public domain. He pointed out that the PDP rigging machine was good at everything, but lacked the sense of mathematics, adding that it was clear, even to a toddler that some fellows awarded figures to themselves.
Mr Finebone said: “Because of the position we occupy, some of us are not expected to put out certain information just like that but I am happy that this information has gone viral. I can assure you that we knew this close to two weeks ago when the information was obliged our legal team."
In Akwa Ibom State, Dr Amadu Atai, the local party chairman, said: “Data obtained from Inec head office in Abuja shows that the total number of accredited voters captured by card readers for the gubernatorial and House of Assembly elections in Akwa Ibom State was 437,128 but the figure declared by the state Inec office was 1,122,836."
A fierce legal battle is now expected in both states, with the APC set to demand a cancellation of the polls and an election-re-run. PDP officials are like to object to this and pray that the tribunal rules the election as free and fair.
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