The Independent National Electoral Commission has said that the collection of results for the 2023 general election will be done manually despite the adoption of electronic transmission of results.
INEC National Commissioner and Chairman of its Voter Information and Education Committee, Festus Okoye, stressed that the commission would transmit the results of the polling units on its results visualization portal, IReV, as ascertained in the last elections, but that the Electoral Law was clear about how the collation should be done.
Okoye said in an interview with our correspondent on Saturday, “There is a marked difference between the transfer/transmission of results and the collation of results. Section 50(2) of the Electoral Act 2022 gives the commission the absolute discretion to determine the manner and procedure of voting in an election and the transmission of election results.
“Articles 60 and 62 of the Electoral Law regulate the post-electoral procedure and the collection of electoral results. Article 60(1) of the Law establishes that the president, after counting the votes in an electoral unit, shall record the votes obtained by each candidate in the manner prescribed by the commission.
“Section 60 (5) of the Act makes it mandatory for the President to transfer the results, including the total number of accredited voters and the voting results in the manner prescribed by the commission. Thereafter, the President , after recording and announcing the results, must deliver them together with the electoral material under security and accompanied by the candidates or their electoral agents, when available to the person prescribed by the commission.
“The implication of this is that the process of collection of results is still essentially manual, but the collection officer must compare subject to his verification and confirmation that the number of accredited voters indicated in the result compared is correct and consistent with the number of accredited voters recorded and transmitted directly from the electoral units”.
He explained that while the collection of results would “essentially” be done manually, where there was a dispute over a comparative result or the result of any polling unit, the collector or polling officer would use the original of the disputed compared result, the accreditation data. of the BVAS device and the results transmitted directly from the voting unit to determine the correctness of the result.
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