Victor EzejaThe Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that the results from polling units will be transmitted immediately after voting ends for the governorship and House of Assembly elections taking place across the federation today.
Festus Okoye, INEC’s National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, made this known when he appeared on Arise News on Friday.
He stated that results would be transmitted on IREV as soon as the polls closed from various polling units, adding that the Commission had learned lessons from what happened during the Presidential and National Assembly elections held on 25th February.
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There were cases of failure of INEC in uploading election results from polling units during the last elections which resulted in opposition political parties who lost, challenging the outcome.
Okoye that the law has prescribed a dual mode of either transmission of results or transfer of results.
“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 assured.
He said that INEC is prepared to conduct the 28 governorship and 993 state assembly constituency elections today, 18th March 2023.
“It’s a huge election and INEC will be paying very close attention to what is going on in the various states.”
On how the results will be transmitted, Okoye said that Presiding Officer who superintends the polling unit would enter the scores of the various political parties in form EC8A which is the polling unit-level result after the conclusion of elections in various units, adding that presiding officers must sign and copies must be given to relevant stakeholders.
He said: “The PO will sign that particular result sheet and stamp it, the PU agent or party agent if available will also countersign and copies will be given to them and the police. That original result will be what will be scanned and uploaded to our INEC Result Viewing Portal for public viewing. Not only that, the accreditation data that have 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.”
Okoye also emphasised that the Collation Officer would be able to verify the original results in the BVAS 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,” he added.
Victor Ezeja is a passionate journalist with six years of experience writing on economy, politics and energy. He holds a Masters degree in Mass Communication.
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