INEC Threatens To Cancel Saturday Election At Crisis-ridden Polling Units

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has threatened that it will not count votes or conduct an election at any polling unit where violence occurs in the forthcoming governorship election in Bayelsa State.

While reiterating the commission’s commitment to ensuring a credible election, INEC Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, who spoke on Tuesday in Yenagoa at a stakeholders meeting, said all ad-hoc staff to be deployed for the November 11 election have been well trained.

Represented by the INEC National Commissioner supervising Akwa-Ibom, Bayelsa, and Rivers, May Agbamuche-Mbu, Yakubu explained that INEC would deploy BIVAS to all polling units for the election.

“I want to let you know that our BIVAS have been customised for INEC, so INEC details and the names of the parties are on the BIVAS, so any BIVAS you see without INEC details cannot be from INEC.

“Another thing, we have all the lists of the serial numbers of the BIVAS we are going to use; the result sheets will be signed at the polling units.

“Where there is violence, it will be zero; we will not return to that polling unit to conduct the election.

“We have recruited and carefully trained all categories of ad-hoc staff to be deployed to the field; all non-sensitive materials have been distributed to all the eight local government area offices of the state, and voter education and sensitization are ongoing,” he said.