Era of election results manipulation over in Nigeria – INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared on Friday that days of wanton manipulation of election results are over in Nigeria.

The INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, stated 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.

He said the commission recorded a breakthrough with the new Electoral Act, 2022, which empowered it to adopt electronic means for both accreditation and results management.

Yakubu noted that the most critical technological tools introduced by the commission in recent times were the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal.

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He said: “BVAS was devised for two principal purposes – to identify and accredit voters using two biometric modes: fingerprint and facial recognition, as well as capturing and uploading the image of the Polling Unit result form (Form EC8A), to the IReV portal.

“Indeed, using the law, administrative measures and technology, the commission has drastically tackled major problems in result management in Nigerian elections.

“Among the top 10 of such problems are falsification of scores at Polling Units, falsification of 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 a declaration and return while result collation is still in progress, and poor record keeping.

“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 election results are over; yet, the commission is not resting on its oars.”

The Executive Director of Yiaga Africa, Samson Itodo, who presented the ERAD Findings on electronic transmission of election results in the Ekiti and Osun governorship elections, said there were four key roles for ERAD.

He added that ERAD promotes transparency of election results management and supports INEC by providing the public with access to election results from the polling unit in relative real-time.

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