Mr Robinson Ariyo, the State House of Assembly candidate for Warri South Constituency 1 in last Saturday’s election, on Wednesday in Warri, Delta State, alleged that the election was marred by massive irregularities.
The human rights lawyer described the polls as the most fraudulent election ever conducted in the history of the state, noting that the ruling party conspired with officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission to rig him out.
Ariyo alleged that a day before the election, thousands of incident report forms were stolen from the INEC office in Warri Local Government Area, with the aid of mobile policemen and INEC officials.
He added that the stealing of the incident forms was intended for filling, prior to the scheduled accreditation process in anticipation for the mass rigging planned for the following day.
‘’It was therefore, very clear from the onset that the staff of the INEC at the Local Government level never planned to make the card reader a tool of choice for accreditation as it eventually played out. In most polling units the card readers were not used for more than 20 minutes and completely abandoned thereafter’’, Ariyo alleged.
He added, ‘’in the Presidential election two weeks earlier, the total votes scored for the 3 units in Ugori by all the parties was less than 500 while in this election, only one unit gave 978 votes to one of the parties. How?
‘’Ballot papers were thumb-printed overnight in the residence of one of the serving commissioners whose name I will withhold for now. Incident forms were extravagantly filled to cover up the deliberate act of not putting the card reader to use’’, he said.
The lawyer said he was heading for the courts to reclaim his ‘mandate’, noting that he was hopeful that the court would vindicate him.
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