Governorship candidate of the Democratic People’s Party (DPP) Chief Great Ovedje Ogboru has said that his party was defeated in the last governorship election in Delta State not by legitimate votes but by invalid votes.
Ogboru who spoke in Abraka, Delta State said that the party will take advantage of the visit of Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Professor Attahiru Jega later this month to show the electoral umpire that DPP won the January 2011, adding that the votes that came from the river-rine areas were nothing but voodoo votes.
“It was from these river-rine communities that they manufactured two hundred and ninety-one thousand votes to defeat us. I know we defeated our closest rival by a wide margin of not less than a hundred and eighty thousand votes and these two hundred and ninety-nine thousand votes was an experience for us and in the next election we will not allow the INEC to be complacent again for votes from non-existing communities to be used to defeat the wish of the people of Delta State.
“We will be talking to INEC on this and there is going to be a workshop when the INEC Chairman will be here on the 25th of August. We shall make a presentation to INEC and we shall follow vigorously for INEC to redress this and to assure us that this will not happen again”, Ogboru said adding that DPP will show INEC that voter turn-out in those communities was in excess of 90%, whereas the average nationwide was about 35%.
“ We shall show by empirical evident that this is not just lip talk, we are not just crying wolf when we should not be crying wolf, we are saying as a matter of fact that we were defeated not by legitimate votes but by invalid votes”, he said.
