Less than twenty-four hours to the keenly contested Osun Governorship election, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has urged members of the public to disregard the rumours that the commission had created additional polling units in the state as alleged by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
According to the Chief Press Secretary to the Chairman of the commission, Mr. Rotimi Oyekanmi the allegations made by agents of the PDP were baseless and a false alarm intended to disrupt the peaceful conduct of the election.
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Oyekanmi said further that INEC as an unbiased umpire would ensure that the votes of Osun citizens will count in selecting the next governor of Osun state.
INEC had been accused by the National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan of creating illegal polling units in Osun to rig Saturday’s election for the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate.
Ologbondiyan at a news conference in Abuja on Friday said that the PDP had alerted Nigerians that the APC had created illegal polling units in the state connivance with INEC thereby delineating illegal wards across the federation.
“It will interest you to know that just as we are preparing for the Osun election, we have been able to burst one of those fictitious electoral wards created for APC to rig election.
Ila Local Government has 11 electoral wards, but ahead of tomorrow’s election, INEC has created an imaginary 12 wards for Ila and allocated over 4,000 votes for that ward, and that ward is called Iperin.
What they have done is to create two wards in Iperin, instead of one; allocated votes for both wards including the original ward and the fictitious ward.” Ologbondiyan had said
He continued further;
“Ordinarily, if INEC was delineating constituency, where two or three wards shares name, they would give it numeral figures. like this Iperin, would have been Iperin 1 and Iperin 2, but what we have in this situation is Iperin, Iperin. Whereas INEC recognised 11 wards in that local government, what we have had now is 11 wards.
And to also showcase the fact that this is a deliberate plot, we discovered that the figures allocated to the two Iperin wards are different , one has over 4,000 votes, the other has over 2,000 votes.
In all, where they would have had 2,000 votes, they want to generate 6,000 votes. We are not yet aware of the number of local government where this is currently happening.”
Ologbondiyan had thereafter demanded that commission expunge the alleged fictitious electoral wards from its database.