The 'presiding officer' was beaten up for allegedly arriving at a polling unit with a pre-filled result sheet.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that the 'presiding officer' who was beaten to a pulp by angry voters in Enugu State during Saturday’s re-run election is not its employee.
The 'presiding officer' was beaten up for allegedly arriving at a polling unit with a pre-filled result sheet.
SaharaReporters had reported that voters who trooped out to exercise their franchise during the re-run election beat up the man.
Witnesses said that in the pre-filled result sheets, the electoral umpire allocated 443 votes to the Peoples Democratic Party candidate (PDP), 31 votes to the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate and 15 votes to the Labour Party candidate for the Igboeze North/Udenu Federal Constituency.
This was as INEC conducted the re-run election in the constituency following the ruling of the Court of Appeal which cancelled the election in some polling units over the non-inclusion of the APC logo in Form EC8A.
However, INEC officials arrived late to many polling units for the elections, polling officers also arrived there without results or with pre-filled results, especially in polling units that have large numbers of voters.
At Igogoro, Ozzi Ward 2 Unit 004, the voters discovered the pre-filled result sheets even before the commencement of voting.
SaharaReporters learnt that the presiding officer, who gave his name as Mr Ronald Ugwudani, from Igbo-Etiti council area of the state, said the pre-filled result sheet was given to him at the local government by INEC.
Trouble started for Ugwundani when voters asked him to show them the result sheet with him following reports that some polling units had no result sheets.
According to witnesses, Ugwundani told the voters that his SPO was coming with it.
Not convinced, irate voters pounced on him and he brought out the result sheet from his bag.
“I told them that the SPO would bring it, so, they forced me to search my bag, I didn’t know that the result sheet was inside my bag. I showed them the result sheet and they wanted to kill me,” he said in a viral video.
The state Resident Electoral Commissioner, Dr Chukwuemeka Chukwu, told journalists on Friday in Enugu that the commission had deployed over 700 staff members and ad hoc staff members as well as 700 security personnel for the re-run.
But on Sunday, INEC in a short statement posted on its X (formerly Twitter) handle denied that Ugwundani was an employee of the commission.
The electoral body said, “Our attention has been drawn to some fake narratives circulating on the social media that a certain employee of the Commission was caught in Enugu State with a pre-filled result sheet for the rerun election held today.
“However, the said individual is not an employee of INEC. He is unknown to the Commission. The public should disregard the report.”
Meanwhile, INEC has declared the PDP candidate, Atigwe Simon, as the winner of the rerun election for the Udenu/Igbo-Eze North Federal Constituency.
Declaring the results of the election in an undisclosed location, for which a video was made available to journalists on Sunday, INEC’s returning officer, Prof Nwachukwu J. Obiaku from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, said that the PDP candidate polled 23,863 votes to defeat Hon. Dennis Agbo of the Labour Party whom he said polled a total of 23,226 votes.
https://x.com/inecnigeria/