The Independent National Electoral Commission has provided information about how polling unit results will be disseminated throughout the states of the federation on Saturday.
Festus Okoye, the chairman of the information and voter education committee, said on Friday on Arise TV, that the commission had learned a lot from the elections for the National Assembly and the presidential office held on February 25.
Major opposition parties, including the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour party, cited the INEC’s failure to upload results as soon as possible during the presidential election as one of the reasons they rejected the commission’s declaration that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress had won.
The law as it stands today stipulates a choice between transmitting results and transferring results, according to Okoye.
The Presiding Officer, who oversaw the polling unit, would enter the results of the various political parties in form EC8A, which is the polling unit level result, when the polls at each unit closed, according to what he said.
“The PO will sign and stamp that specific result sheet, the PU agent or party agent, if available, will also countersign it, and copies will be given to them and the police,” he said.
“That actual result will be scanned and uploaded for public viewing on our INEC Result Viewing Portal. Not only that, the accreditation data that has arisen from that polling unit will also be uploaded, but the physical result and the BVAS itself will also be taken to the Registration Area Collation centre.”
According to him, the Collation Officer will have the benefit of seeing the original results and the BVAS itself and have the benefit of looking at the accreditation data as transmitted, and the result sheet as transmitted from the polling unit. That is the dual mode which the law has prescribed for the commission and that is the mode that we’re going to use for the purpose of this election.
Speaking on real-time IREV delivery on Saturday, Okoye said results would be transmitted as soon as the polls closed from various polling units.
“The commission is determined to improve on its previous performance. What we have done is to learn valuable lessons from previous elections that we conducted, and we’re going to put those lessons into our planning purposes and processes, and into our deployment purposes,” Okoye said.
Speaking on the commission’s preparedness, Okoye said, “As of today, what we’re having is what we call state assembly and governorship elections.
“In all the states of the federation, both the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines and all the sensitive election materials have left the Central Bank and the various state offices of the federation.
“We want to ensure that all polling units open on time. Secondly, we made sure that we reconfigured all the BVAS that will be used for this particular election in terms of making sure that the BVAS perform optimally and also making sure that some of the challenges we had in the previous elections do not reoccur.”
He added that INEC had also given refresher training to all categories of staff that would be involved in the elections.
He said the country would be having 28 governorship elections and 993 state assembly constituency elections, saying “It’s a huge election and INEC will be paying very close attention to what is going on in the various states.”
