BENIN – Yiaga Africa, a Citizen-led movement under the Watching The Vote (WTV) Working Group, has called on the National Assembly to integrate IReV into the electoral Act to make electronic transmission of results mandatory.
Yiaga Africa also called on INEC to review its collation processes because the just concluded Edo governorship election allegedly failed integrity test due to lack of transparency.
Mr Paul James, Election Programme Manager, Yiaga Africa made the call in Benin during a post-election meeting with Civil Society Organisations(CSOs) and the Media.
James, however , said that accreditation, voting, counting and recording of results at the polling units substantially complied with procedures.
He alleged that the results collation process was compromised by the actions of some biased INEC officials in connivance with other actors.
“This manipulation severely undermines the overall integrity of the election as we earlier stated in our report and Yiaga Africa stand by that report.
” It is imperative to integrate the IReV and electronic transmission of results into the electoral legal framework to confer legality on polling units level results uploaded on the portal.
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“To this end, the national assembly should expeditiously amend the electoral act to make electronic transmission of results mandatory, ” he said.
Yiaga Africa, however, commended the resilience and patience of Edo voters who turned out in the face of logistical challenges and rainfall that caused late opening of polls.
According to James, drastic steps are now needed for fundamental electoral reforms to restore public confidence in the electoral process and urgent change of attitude of political actors towards politics.
Also speaking, the Political Advisor to UN and ECOWAS Peace Support Operations in Africa, Blessed Jattoh, urged INEC to leverage on technology to minimise human factors in results collation process.
According to him, moving forward, Nigeria should harness and leverage on technology as we find all over the world, to cut some of the excesses we find in our electoral system.
The Executive Director of Youth Empowerment Advocacy and Good Governance Initiative, Solomon Idiogbe, noted that an automated BVAS was needed to count votes and upload same immediately.
“That way, the result will be displayed real time. As people are clicking, the result will be automatically collating itself in the BVAS for people to see, instead of snapping a pdf version of the total result into the server, “Idiogbe added.
