Malawi’s President Joyce Banda says she is annulling this week’s general election – in which she was a candidate – because of voting “irregularities”.<\/p>\n
Ms Banda had earlier said Tuesday’s vote had been marred by rigging, multiple voting and computer-hacking.<\/p>\n
She said a new vote should be held within 90 days but she would not stand again in any new poll.<\/p>\n
However, the head of the electoral commission said the president did not have the power to annul the vote.<\/p>\n
Malawi’s election was chaotic, with one BBC correspondent reporting people voting two days on from election day because of delays in distributing polling material.<\/p>\n
Frustrated voters set one polling station alight and smashed election material at another.<\/p>\n
In some places, voting boxes or lids did not arrive so officials used buckets and plastic wrap.<\/p>\n
The president of the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC), Maxon Mbendera. said despite problems involving the electronic count, the poll remained valid and vote-counting would go on.<\/p>\n
Late on Friday, the MEC said Joyce Banda’s rival candidate Peter Mutharika had taken a lead of 42%, with 30% of votes counted. Ms Banda was in second place with 23%, the commission said.<\/p>\n
“I am nullifying the elections, using the powers invested in me by the Malawi constitution,” Ms Banda told a news conference.<\/p>\n
“I want to give Malawians an opportunity to choose a candidate of their choice in a free and fair manner. When elections are to be held again, I will be stepping aside,” she added.<\/p>\n
Mrs Banda had previously accused a party, which she did not name, of infiltrating and hacking the MEC’s counting system.<\/p>\n
The MEC’s chairman denied that its system had been hacked.<\/p>\n
In a previous statement about the elections, Mrs Banda had said that irregularities included.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malawi’s President Joyce Banda says she is annulling this week’s general election – in which she was a candidate – because of voting “irregularities”. Ms Banda had earlier said Tuesday’s vote had been marred by rigging, multiple voting and computer-hacking. She said a new vote should be held within 90 days but she would not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":20600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[929,14,993],"class_list":["post-20599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-ho","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah","tag-president-ouattara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}