The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has revealed how it will transmit results for the Saturday, March 18 governorship and State House of Assembly elections.
INEC Chairman of Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, who spoke during an interview on Arise TV monitored by The New Diplomat, Friday, said the electoral commission will deploy dual mode of transmission of results.
According to Okoye, INEC will use both electronic and manual modes of transmission of results.
The New Diplomat reports part of the huge controversies surrounding the just-concluded presidential election was how the results were uploaded. The Labour Party and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had bemoaned the manual transmission of results as the IReV portal flopped.
The opposition parties knocked INEC over its failure to upload results in real-time during the presidential election.
Reacting to the controversies, Okoye said the Electoral Act, 2022 makes provision for a dual mode of transmitting results.
He further added that when polls close at the level of the various units, the Presiding Officer who oversees the polling unit will enter the scores of the various political parties in form EC8A which is the polling unit level results.
“The law as of today prescribes a dual mode of either transmission of results or transfer of results.
“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 has 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.”
According to him, “the Collation Officer will have the benefit of seeing the original results and the BVAS itself 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.”
