The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has stated that days of wanton manipulation of election results are over in Nigeria, as it has blocked all avenues for such.
Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, Chairman, INEC said this at a Stakeholder Roundtable on Election Result Management and the Launch of the Election Results Analysis Dashboard (ERAD) Report on Electronic Transmission of Results organised by Yiaga Africa in Abuja on Friday, September 9.
He said that INEC recorded a breakthrough with the new Electoral Act, 2022, which empowered it to adopt electronic means for both accreditation and results management and this made it a legal requirement for INEC to transmit results electronically.
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According to him, the most critical technological tools introduced by the commission in recent times are the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal adding that while the former was a device, the latter was a web portal.
He said the BVAS was used for two principal purposes; to identify and accredit voters using two biometric modes: fingerprint and facial recognition, as well as to capture and upload the image of the Polling Unit result form (Form EC8A), to the IReV portal.
The INEC Chairman said;
Indeed, using the law, administrative measures and technology, the commission has drastically tackled major problems in result management in Nigerian elections.
Among the top ten of such problems are falsification of scores at Polling Units, falsification of a number of accredited voters, collation of false results, mutilation of results, and computational errors.
Others are swapping of result sheets, forging result sheets, snatching and destruction of result sheets, obtaining declaration and return involuntarily, making declaration and return while result collation is still in progress and poor recordkeeping.
It is clear that armed with an improved electoral act, administrative procedures and requisite technology, the Commission has increased the transparency and confidence of the public in its election result management processes.
I can confidently say that the days of wanton manipulation of elections results are over; yet, the commission is not resting on its oars.
He said that starting with the Nasarawa Central State Constituency by-election election, the IReV has been deployed in 105 elections, involving 16,694,461 registered voters for five governorship, six Senatorial Districts, seven Federal Constituency, 18 State Constituency, six FCT Chairmanship, and 62 FCT Councillorship elections.
The INEC said that a total of 32,985 results were successfully uploaded, giving an upload success rate of 99.13 per cent.
What this successful transmission of results demonstrates is that the concern about the capacity of the Commission to transmit results from all over the country may well be unfounded.
He said that a total of 128,994 accounts have been opened by IReV users since it was launched two years ago August 2020.
He said another technical concern for INEC was the repeated attempts to break through its cyber security system for the portal but it has always failed.
