Rush to destroy faulty ballots, issue new ones

The Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) has rushed to de­stroy de­fec­tive bal­lot pa­pers for Spe­cial Elec­tors dis­cov­ered re­cent­ly in 40 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment ar­eas—and EBC’s hus­tling to pre­pare new bal­lot pa­pers for vot­ers to start col­lect­ing from to­mor­row.

This was the sce­nario yes­ter­day af­ter EBC con­firmed that de­fec­tive bal­lot pa­pers for Spe­cial Elec­tors were de­tect­ed in 40 of the 139 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment ar­eas.

It’s es­ti­mat­ed that sev­er­al thou­sand bal­lot pa­pers were in­volved.

EBC stat­ed the pre­scribed pro­ce­dure “wasn’t fol­lowed” con­cern­ing cer­tain elec­toral ar­eas.

The sit­u­a­tion has been blamed on “in­cor­rect mark­ings” by some re­turn­ing of­fi­cers on the bal­lot pa­pers.

Fol­low­ing the dis­cov­ery of the de­fec­tive bal­lots, the EBC as­sured that no spe­cial elec­tor had as yet re­ceived any bal­lot pa­pers.

How­ev­er, the sit­u­a­tion has caused deep con­cern among po­lit­i­cal par­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly since EBC’s alert on the mat­ter was is­sued, mere days be­fore the start of Mon­day’s spe­cial vot­ing ex­er­cise for the De­cem­ber 2 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment poll.

Spe­cial vot­ing is sched­uled to take place from Mon­day un­til Sun­day De­cem­ber 1.