MONROVIA, Montserrado – Jerome Korkoya, chairman of the National Elections Commission says one incident of tampering with elections materials was reported in Nimba’s fourth district on Tuesday, October 10.

Speaking at a news conference at the NEC headquarters in Sinkor on Wednesday, Korkoya explained that elections materials for polling stations at the Bongarplay Public School were delivered to, and signed for, Prince Bollie, an electoral supervisor in the area.

However, NEC said only three polling places were set up and not four, as should have been the case.

According to Korkoya, Rufus Zerlee, a representative candidate on the ticket of the Coalition for Liberia’s Progress, allegedly incited some individuals and disrupted the voting process at the precinct in Nimba. He said “voting was compromised” in the area.

Korkoya said Zerlee had been turned over to the Liberia National Police in Nimba for investigation.

“NEC has launched an inquiry and made a decision to quarantine the elections materials from the precinct,” he said.

He emphasized that polling at the polling precinct will be rescheduled shortly.

The NEC chairman asserted that the large queues and the longer than expected processing times in polling places were unfortunate and offered his apologies.

“The NEC queue controllers were not at their best, and the commission takes the responsibility and apologizes to the public,” he said.

He said there were quite a lot of frustration on the part of the voters because the queue controllers “fell short of the duty.”

Korkoya acknowledged that there were also some other incidents of late opening of polling places in some areas across the country but said those incidents did not lead to any major obstacles.

The NEC chairman said ballots papers had been counted and the results are being transported to the NEC’s headquarters for aggregation.

He said NEC would start releasing provisional results on Thursday, October 12 and called on all political parties and candidates as well as voters to wait patiently for the results.

Watch the press conference below:

Featured photo by Zeze Evans Ballah