Unity Party Campaign coordinator and Senator-elect of Gbapolu County, Amara Konneh, reading unofficial preliminary results during a livestream on Spoon Talk on November 15 claimed that report from Grand Kru County suggests that the number of people who voted in the county were more than the registered voters.
Mr. Konneh said the UP has called on the National Elections Commission (NEC) to cease counting in the specific areas. This means these polling places were quarantined.
The Claim
Konneh’s exact words were: “Today, we got report from Grand Kru that our people there [Grand Kru] have requested that certain ballot boxes be quarantined because more people voted than the number of registered voters in the area, this is an allegation”.
Another post by Prince Toles, Montserrado County District 8 Representative-elect, claimed that the number of people who voted in the run-off election in Grand Kru County were “47,292”, more than the number of registered voters in the county.
Also, a Facebook user, Stanley Cooper claimed in a post that “few ballot boxes have been quarantined from Grand Kru County due to ballot stuffing.”
Rating Justification
To verify this claim we contacted the Chairman of NEC Strategic Communications Committee, Samuel B. Cole, to establish whether ballot boxes were quarantined in Grand Kru County.
Mr. Cole in response to our inquiry confirmed that “there were few ballot boxes quarantined to be investigated”.
He furthered that the Election Magisterial Officer for Grand Kru County, Stanislaus Wisseh, has earlier informed him that he had received complaint from Unity Party over the inaccuracy in the number of people who voted in the county and incidents of alleged ballot stuffing.
NEC did not release results from the just ended Runoff election in Grand Kru County during the first day of announcement of the preliminary results, and its Chairperson Davidetta Browne Lansanah told the public that “Grand Kru results weren’t given due to the late start of tallying in the county”.
According to the NEC Data, the total number of registered voters in Grand Kru County is 42,396.
Conclusion
Based on the response from the NEC Strategic Communications Committee Chairman Samuel B. Cole, we conclude that the claim made by partisans of the Unity Party that certain ballot boxes have been quarantined in Grand Kru County is mostly correct.
Mr. Cole told our fact checking desk that few ballot boxes in the county have been quarantined to be investigated due to a complaint filed by the Unity Party over the alleged inaccuracy in the number of voters in the southeastern county.
This report was developed with the support of Internews through the USAID Media Activity project. The funder has no say in the editorial decision leading to the production of this content