The Transition Monitoring Group, TMG, an election observer and monitoring group, on Thursday announced that it will deploy 325 observers to cover the governorship election in Bayelsa State on Saturday.

Chairman of TMG, Ibrahim Zikirul, made the announcement at a pre-election news conference in Yenagoa on Thursday, adding that 300 of the observers will be stationary while 25 will be moving from place to place on election day.

The 300 stationary observers, he said, would be deployed to man 300 of the 1,804 polling units in the eight local governments in the state.

He said that TMG will use its Quck Count Election Observation methodology to independently verify the official results declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.

“TMG’s Quick Count for the December 5, 2015 Bayelsa Governorship elections will involve deploying 300 carefully selected trained and accredited citizen observers to a representative random sample of 300 out of 1,804 polling units in all eight LGAs.

“The citizen observers will witness the entire election day process from set-up of the pooling unit through the announcement and posting of the official results.

“Throughout the course of the day, TMG’s citizen observers will send in reports in near real time via coded text message using their mobile phones to a National Information Centre (NIC) located in Yenagoa,” Zikirul said.

He said that TMG had been observing the processed leading to governorship election and lamented that from the pre-election report it put together, there were indications that election violence might break out in places like Kolokuma/Opokuma, Nembe, Southern Ijaw and Yenagoa local government areas.

The election monitoring group thus called on the Police and other security agencies to pay particular attention to these local governments, In order to forestall outbreak of violence.

The TGM also urged candidates to denounce hate speech and acts of violence by their supporters while also sticking issues based campaigns.