MONROVIA, Montserrado – Far ahead of the pronouncement of final official results of Tuesday’s elections, international media have been falsely announcing that the candidate for the Coalition for Democratic Change, George Weah, has been elected president.
On some international news sites, including Kenya’s popular Standard newspaper, Gossip Mill Nigeria, Zambia’s Observer newspaper, reports are surfacing just two days after the historic elections when the Nations Elections Commission which is the official authority to announce electoral results has not started releasing any results from the polls.
Soccer stars with millions of followers, including the French Marcel Desailly and the Italian Paolo Maldini, have made posts on their social media pages congratulating Weah. In fact, BBC even reported that Arsene Wenger, manager of the popular English Premier League football club Arsenal, had been duped by false reports into thinking that Weah had won, leading him to issue congratulations.
Although the first set of provisional results have put Weah and Vice President Joseph Boakai in the lead for the presidential race, results are far from final and do not include all precincts.
Electoral laws in Liberia exclusively give NEC the responsibility to announce electoral results and local media, for the most part, have been careful to not report that anyone has won.
Since the close of polls on Tuesday evening, tallying of votes are ongoing in the presence of international and local observers, media and party and candidate representatives, across the 19 magisterial offices of the commission.
Under an absolute majority requirement, a presidential candidate in Liberia must win more than 50 percent of the total votes cast. In the absence of any of the candidate achieving the mark, the law requires that the first two candidates with the highest votes go into a run-off or second round of the election on a simple majority.
That means that a run-off election would be held if none of the candidates in the presidential race achieve more than half of all the votes.
Featured photo screenshot of BBC News website
