28 governorships, 993 state Assembly seats to be contested, Saturday – INEC, says ‘We’ve learned our lessons’
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says a total of 28 governorship offices and 993 state Assembly constituency seats will be contested for in Saturday, March 18 election across the country.
The governors and state Houses of Assembly election follows the disputed Presidential and National Assembly poll already conducted by the INEC, last February 25.
This Saturday’s elections was originally slated for last week, March 11 but had to be shifted following INEC’s inability to complete the reconfiguration of its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines in time for the next election.
Speaking as guest of Arise TV interview programme, Friday, on the level of preparedness of the electoral umpire for the election, this Saturday, INEC Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Barrister Festus Okoye, admitted that the commission had learnt valuable lessons from the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections.
According to Okoye, the commission has concluded refresher training to all categories of staff that would be involved in the elections, as he informed that the country would be having 28 governorship elections and 993 state assembly constituency elections.
“As of today, what we’re having is what we call state assembly and governorship elections.
“In all the states of the federation, both the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines and all the sensitive election materials have left the Central Bank and the various state offices of the federation.
“We want to ensure that all polling units open on time. Secondly, we made sure that we reconfigured all the BVAS that will be used for this particular election in terms of making sure that the BVAS perform optimally and also making sure that some of the challenges we had in the previous elections do not reoccur.”
On the modality for the conduct of the elections, Okoye detailed the process which INEC will follow in order to ensure that what occurred during the Presidential poll is avoided.
“The law as of today prescribes a dual mode of either transmission of results or transfer of results,” Okoye said, adding that when polls close at the level of the various units, the Presiding Officer who superintended the polling unit would enter the scores of the various political parties in form EC8A which is the polling unit level result.
“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.
On real-time IREV delivery on Saturday, Okoye said results would be transmitted as soon as the polls closed from various polling units.
“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.
“It’s a huge election and INEC will be paying very close attention to what is going on in the various states,” Okoye said.
