Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, admitted, yesterday, that it would not transmit the result of this year’s election as widely expected due to lack of an enabling law to strengthen its hands in doing so. But the commission, however, mocked desperate politicians clandestinely buying Permanent Voters Cards, PVCs, from some ignorant Nigerians with the hope of using same to achieve electoral advantage during the polls.
Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, at a stakeholders’ meeting in Abuja, said it was futile for politicians to buy off PVCs from other Nigerians, as the commission had devised strategies to neutralise such devious acts. Yakubu said: “It is futile for politicians to buy off PVCs with a view to using them to rig the forthcoming elections. Some of the perpetrators of the act are of the belief that they can somehow hack into our website and make use of those pvcs. “It is indeed very sad to say that some political actors are working hard to subvert our system. But they will not succeed. I want to assure those elements that we are aware of what they are doing and to let them know that we are far ahead of them.”
National Commissioner in charge of Operations, Prof Okechukwu Ibeanu, explained at the forum that it would not be possible to transmit the result of next month’s election because of the absence of an enabling law to do so. Ibeanu, however, said INEC would be able to do so in subsequent elections if the electoral laws are amended to empower the commission to transmit its results electronically. While confirming that the use of incident forms had been completely eliminated from the polls, Ibeanu said, however, that the election would be conducted largely with the 2015 Electoral Act, which made room for simultaneous accreditation and voting, using the Smart Card Readers, SCRs.
The commissioner said the current EA provides for manual election result transmission and would have been done electronically if the Act had been amended to cater for electronic transmission.
