The Chief Electoral Commissioner Dr Christiana Thorpe yesterday disclosed that some results from Bombali have been removed from the data base of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) because of suspected cases of over-voting.
The NEC Chief announced that results in question will be further investigated and as a result the total results from Bombali is lower than the first set of results issued by the Commission on Monday.
Ms Thorpe maintained that if the allegations of over voting are found to be true for any polling station those results will be invalidated.
On Monday she had disclosed that results for a polling station in Lumley were being investigated for over voting.
Meanwhile with 37.7% of the votes counted the governing Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) candidate Vice President Solomon Berewa has gained 8 percentage points from Monday’s results.
Whereas on Monday the All Peoples Congress (APC) candidate Ernest Bai Koroma had jumped into a 28 percentage point lead, the results released Tuesday show that the difference between the two Presidential candidates has now been reduced to 20 percentage points with Ernest polling 60% while Berewa has polled 40% of the 37.7% results released so far.
The 20 percentage point votes in real terms, is 150,218 votes. This figure is however significantly higher than the earlier difference of 130,097. Therefore in real terms the APC Presidential candidate has increased his lead by an additional 20,139 votes.
Dr Thorpe announced that results from 2,324 polling stations have now been entered into the results database which represents 37.7% of all polling stations across the country.
She emphasised that these are very partial results, as there are still 3,833 polling stations pending adding that the average national turnout is currently 72.2%. with 16,938 invalid votes, representing 2.2% of the total votes cast.
Tuesday’s Presidential announcement continued to put APC’s Ernest Koroma in the lead with 441,908 whilst SLPP Solomon Berewa is trailing with 291,690