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BY RICHARD DRASIMAKU
ARUA: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2026
The electoral commission has set February 26, 2026 as the tentative date for the residual elections for the Female Councilor representing Bazaar Ward in the Arua Central Division.
This follows the discovery of anomalies on the ballot Today (Tuesday 17, 2026) when the rescheduled polls were supposed to take place.
Voters from the 18 polling stations that had hoped to settle the electoral contest were disappointed to find that the ballot papers had not been cleaned as a late former candidate reappeared on the ballots instead of the replacement candidate.
Osman Ezale, the Arua City Returning officer told the people to stay calm, stating that even election officials are also fatigued and are looking forward to having the electoral processes concluded.
“We had submitted the updates but someone probably due to fatigue slept on the job. They downloaded the old data from the data base and reprinted it without updating,” he said.
The erroneous ballots were packed and send to Arua without verifying only to have the anomaly discovered when polling was supposed to start early in the morning.
This prompted supporters of a jittery candidate of the National Resistance Movement, Zuria Adukudua who was the other candidate on the ballot alongside the deceased to demand that their candidate be declared as the female representative to the Division Council.
This prompted the police to deploy heavily around the regional electoral commission offices to avert any unlawful gathering from forming due to the fear of the commission yielding to such unlawful demand.
Zabib Aliasi of the Forum for Democratic Change is the official candidate challenging Adukudua who was nominated as replacement for the deceased but her details have consecutively missed on the ballot papers leading to two consecutive postponement of the polls.
Ezale told the people to bear with the commission saying such errors are not only peculiar to Arua City but a national phenomenon.
“Be assured that the election will take place. We have exchanged correspondences and we have confirmations that the updated information has been received by the electoral commission office in Kampala,” he said in an interview.
