Rerun may not hold in areas where INEC offices were burnt

 

INDEPENDENT National Electoral Commission INEC

INDEPENDENT National Electoral Commission INEC’s Resident Commissioner in Delta State, Dr. Ogbudu Gabriel Ada, says  the Delta State governorship  re-run election holding  on Thursday  might not hold in areas where INEC offices were burnt during the 2007 polls following the destruction of the vital records including the voter-register, even as the governorship candidate of  Labour Party, Mr. Abel Adijala,  said he was still in the race and has not thrown his support for the PDP candidate, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan.

Adijala said he had refused over 200 telephone calls over the report in a national electronic medium to the effect that Labour Party has backed out of the race to support Uduaghan, saying that “I have written a petition over the matter. But meanwhile I have assured my teeming supporters that “I am still on course.”
Addressing newsmen in Asaba,  yesterday, the INEC commissioner  maintained that the Commission  was going to use the old voter-register used in conducting the 2007 elections and added that there are over 1.5 million voters in the state.
Said he, “when the voter- register was compiled, we had what we called the electronic voter-register and the data is stored in the server which is at the national headquarters.
“So, in any local government area they thought they have snatched, we have a back- up in the server. We were able to retrieve all that data and we have been able to print. them.’’
It is only in one or two polling units where the people burnt our offices, they burnt our manual registers, they burnt our electronic registers, even the data that was collated, which had not been downloaded into the server were burnt in the process. So it is only in one or two places of those places, we may not have the voters register for them. But then, that one is not our problem because they (community) caused it themselves. We believe it will not be substantial to affect the outcome of the result of an election”.

Source:http://www.vanguardngr.com