A pro-democracy group, Transition Monitoring Group, TMG, has frowned at the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC’s alleged plans to collate 2023 election results manually, as against the new practice of electronic transmission.
The TMG Chairman, Auwal Musa-Rafsanjani, in a statement at the weekend, said actions of this nature tend to stir public suspicions, considering Nigeria’s long history of electoral fraud.
According to him, the decision is worrisome expecially at the time when the confidence of Nigerian voters was bolstered by the recent electoral reforms and the seeming willingness of the Commission and government of the day to embrace electoral transparency and integrity.
He said: “It is thus worrisome that the news making the rounds is a decision by the electoral body to conduct manual collation of results.
“For avoidance of doubt, one of the key features of the new Electoral Act towards improving the integrity of the electoral process, was the introduction of the Bimordial Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) which captures three stages of the voting process: it acts as the Voter Enrolment Device (IVED) during voter registration, performs the voter accreditation on an election day and as INEC Results Viewing Device (IReV Device) to be used for election results upload on an election day.
“Given the statement by the National Commissioner and Chairman of the Information and Voter Education Committee that while collation process of results is still essentially manual, the collation officer must collate subject to his verification and confirmation that the number of accredited voters stated on the collated result are correct and consistent with the number of accredited voters recorded and transmitted directly from polling units, there are key questions to be asked.
“Why then does the Commission need to collate manually if the electronic transmission figures will prevail? We cannot afford to take two steps back for every step forward that we take.”
The group, therefore, called on the Commission to provide clarity on its recent pronouncement so as to assuage the suspicions of the electorate and rebuild their confidence to exercise their rights to vote.
“The INEC should further seek to ensure that whatever actions are taken in the run up to the elections do not run in violation of the provisions of the Act,” the statement added.
