Voting will take place at six polling stations in the Akwatia Constituency where ballot boxes were said to have been tampered with during the December 7 general election to determine the winner of the parliamentary race. The seat for the constituency is being keenly contested by Dr Kofi Asare of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and Baba Mohammed Ahmed Jamal of the National Democratic Congress (NDC); who IS also the party’s Deputy General Secretary. The Akwatia re-run will be on December 28, 2008, alongside the presidential run-off and the ballots will be added to those already counted for the declaration of full results. Speaking to the Daily Graphic in Accra, the Chairman of the EC, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, also touched on the special voting for security and other officials who would be busy on December 28, as well as some administrative procedures to be, instituted to reduce the long queues at some polling stations on that day. He said the decision to re-run the election at the six polling stations at Akwatia was arrived at after painstaking investigations by the EC. At dusk on December 7, when results were being collated at Akwatia, supporters of the NPP and the NDC were said to have nearly clashed, compelling electoral officers and security personnel to convey the electoral materials and ballot boxes to the electoral office at Kade for collation. Counting started at 7 a.m. the next day and ended at 3.10 p.m., according to the EC's electoral officer, but the ballots in six boxes were not collated. Two of the six ballot boxes were destroyed by machomen around 3.30 p.m. while voting was going on. Four other boxes, along with the electoral materials, were whisked away by the machomen. As a result of the development, vote counting was limited to the rest of the remaining ballot boxes. Regarding the special voting, Dr Afari-Gyan said it would be held on December 23 for people who would undertake special services during the December 28 run-off, including security personnel and journalists. He said the EC was working out the details of a plan to ensure that polling stations that witnessed long queues would be divided into two or more sub-stations to facilitate voting and also deal with the issue of long queues. During the December 7 polls, some polling stations recorded long queues, resulting in some voters being in long and winding queues for hours. Source: Daily Graphic