On Sunday, October 15, Martin K.N Kolllie, Unity Party’s campaign team, used his official Facebook page to claim that the National Elections Commission (NEC) did not announce the results for Gbarpolu County during its daily press briefing but uploaded the results on its official website.
Kollie posted a screenshot of Gbarpolu County Presidential results from the NEC’s website on his official Facebook page. This post attracted 684 reactions, 335 comments and 166 shares.
In his post, Kollie wrote: “Davidetta Browne, you didn’t call Gbarpolu but you uploaded this. How come? This is NOT true.”
Rating Justification
Our fact-checking desk verified this claim and found it to be true. To arrive at verdict, we reviewed the presidential results on the NEC official website and found that the page was updated for Gbarpolu County on October 15, 2023 at 06:21 PM.
The updated results on the website indicates that 100% of the votes in Gbarpolu County have been reported with all 134 polling places tallied. The total number of votes counted is 39,893 which accounts for 78.82% of the vote, including both valid and invalid votes. According to the NEC Final Registration Roll from Gbarpolu County published by NEC, the total registered voter is 50,615.
On October 14, the NEC had announced tallied results from 96 out of the total 134 polling places, which accounted for 71.64% of the vote.
During NEC daily press briefing on Sunday, October 16, , the Commission did not announce the Presidential results from Gbarpolu County as was done for the other 14 counties.
Journalists raised questions during the briefing (at 2:02:58) about the omission, and the NEC Chairperson, Davidetta Browne Lansanah, said the Gbarpolu County presidential results will be announced when consolidated.
Her exact words were: “We will not announce presidential for a singular county because there has to be all of these votes tallied consolidated before we announce the presidential, that will be in the final results.”
Conclusion
Based on our review of the NEC’s website and the statements made during the press briefing, we conclude that Martin K. N. Kollie’s claim is CORRECT. The NEC did not announce the Presidential results for Gbarpolu County during the press briefing, but the results were uploaded on their official website.
Local Voices Liberia, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, has implemented the iVerify Liberia system with the objective of strengthening capacities to address threats to information integrity, especially in view of the upcoming 2023 elections, to ensure all Liberian citizens have access to credible, reliable and verified information, everywhere and at all times.
This initiative is funded by Irish Aid, Embassy of Sweden in Monrovia, European Union Delegation in Liberia and the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund. The donors have no say in the production of this fact check report.
