UDP Says It Will Track Polling Agents by GPS to Guard Against Vote Fraud

By Seedy Jobe

Lamin Manneh, the United Democratic Party’s deputy administrative secretary for external affairs, said the party has adopted strict safeguards against electoral malpractice ahead of the 2026 presidential election, including geolocation tracking for all of its polling agents.

Mr. Manneh described the measures in an interview on “The Grand Bantaba,” a weekly current affairs program on Kerr Fatou.

He said the party had drawn lessons from the 2021 election, when, he alleged, results were inflated in some areas where UDP agents were absent. He cited a village of about 152 people that he said had reported more than 2,000 votes, a discrepancy he said the party confirmed through Google Maps and on-the-ground checks. The claims could not be independently verified.

Under the new system, every UDP agent will be tracked by geolocation, Mr. Manneh said, and an alert will sound if an agent moves more than five meters from an assigned polling station. The party’s control center would then be notified, the agent would be called, and supervisors would be sent to locate the agent using his or her coordinates.

Mr. Manneh said agents were being trained on how the system works and had been told they could not leave with party data undetected.

“You cannot walk away with our data this time and get away with it,” he said.

He said the measure was more than rhetoric, noting that agents were being shown how the tracking operates during training.

While the party trusts its agents, Mr. Manneh said, it is mindful of the money that flows during elections. He alleged that President Adama Barrow had said one billion dalasis would be spent in this election, money he said could be used to bribe agents.

“Because Barrow said they will spend 1 billion in this election, they can buy anybody who wants to be sold,” he said.

The party is therefore taking steps to make it difficult to compromise its agents, he said, including assigning supervisors in addition to the agents at each station.