The manner in which polling unit results will be disseminated throughout the federation’s states on Saturday has been described by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
Festus Okoye, the chairman of the INEC Information and Voter Education Committee, stated on Arise TV on Friday that the commission has taken important lessons from the elections for the National Assembly and the presidential inauguration on February 25.
Major opposition parties like the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour party held on to this as one of the bases for rejecting the presidential election result where Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress was declared the winner by the commission, and controversy followed INEC’s failure to upload results as early as possible during the presidential election.
“As of now, the legislation mandates either results transfer or results transmission,” Okoye stated.
The Presiding Officer, who oversaw the polling unit, would input 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 delivered to them to the police,” he stated.
“The actual result will be scanned and uploaded for public viewing on our INEC Result Viewing Site. Also, the physical results and the BVAS itself will be transported to the Registration Area Collation Center, together with the accreditation data that has been generated from that polling station.
He claims that the Collation Officer will benefit from viewing the original results, the BVAS itself, and from being able to view the accreditation data as it has been transmitted as well as the result sheet that has been sent from the polling place. According to the legislation, the commission must operate in a dual mode, and that is the manner we will employ in order to conduct this election.
When discussing real-time IREV distribution on Saturday, Okoye noted that results would be communicated from various polling locations as soon as the polls closed.
The commission is committed to outperforming its prior efforts. As a result of our experience with prior elections, we have learned some important lessons that we will apply to our planning, deployment, and deployment processes, according to Okoye.
“As of now, what we’re having is what we call state assembly and governorship elections,” Okoye stated in reference to the commission’s readiness.
Both the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines and all of the sensitive election materials have left the Central Bank and the various state offices of the federation, and are now in all of the states.
“We want to make sure that every voting location opens on schedule. Second, we made sure to reconfigure all of the BVAS that will be utilized for this election in order to ensure their best performance and the avoidance of some of the problems we experienced in previous elections.
He continued by saying that all types of workers who would be working the polls have received refresher training from INEC.
“It’s a large election and INEC will be paying very close attention to what is going on in the various states,” he said, referring to the country’s 28 gubernatorial elections and 993 state assembly seat elections.
