The Electoral Commission is to rerun the parliamentary election at a particular polling station in the Dome Kwabenya.
This was after the Commission once again suspended the final declaration of the constituency results in its third attempt as its move to re-collate results from three polling stations only saw success in collating just two.
The third polling station’s results – the Abokobi Women’s Development Centre 2 – remained unresolved due to persistent challenges.
Director of Training at the EC, Dr. Serebour Quaicoe explained that “the commission rejected one of them outrightly on the stance that it was declared on a wrong statement of poll because they used training sheets, which is not the one that they should use.”
“So the commission has rejected one, so we decided to come and add the two and see what happens.”
After adding the two valid results, the margin between the two leading candidates narrowed to just 165 votes.
However, the disputed result, involving 669 voters, could significantly alter the outcome. If all those votes were awarded to the trailing candidate, they would overtake the leading candidate.
This possibility led the EC to decide on a rerun at the affected polling station.
This was after the collation took a dramatic turn as disagreements between political parties and the EC threatened to derail the process.
At the heart of the contention were conflicting claims over the number of polling stations requiring re-collation and the validity of earlier declarations.
The dispute began when the New Patriotic Party (NPP) parliamentary candidate, Mike Oquaye Jnr, raised objections to the ongoing collation process, JoyNews’ James Avedzi reported.
According to the MP aspirant, there were discrepancies regarding the number of polling stations left to be collated before the chaos that marred the earlier process.
“In the dying hours of the collation in the constituency, just before the chaos erupted, there were 88 polling stations left to be collated,” the reporter said.
He said Mr Oquaye argued that the NPP was not present for the collation of 85 out of these 88 polling stations, which, according to him, invalidated the subsequent declaration made in their absence.
This objection was met with resistance from the National Democratic Congress (NDC), which maintained that only three polling stations were outstanding.
The NDC insisted that the process should focus solely on these three polling stations and that the rest of the results were valid as declared.
In the end, the EC suspended the declaration and announced a re-run over the outstanding polling station – the Abokobi Women’s Development Centre 2 polling station.
