Chairman, Senate Committee on Electoral Matters, Senator Sharafadeen Alli, has disclosed that the joint committee of the 10th National Assembly on electoral matters is working assiduously to improve on the nation’s electoral process.
Alli who featured on a television programme said the last general election was better than previous ones, adding there had been significant improvements on the electoral process.
The lawmaker commended the 9th National Assembly under the leadership of Senator Ahmed Lawan for passing the 2022 Electoral law which allowed the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) as a game changer.
He said the Electoral Act 2022 brought a lot of improvements to the voting process and other legislations concerning the election.
“We will work assiduously to ensure improvement on the technology deployed for the electoral process and guidelines already in place,” he said.
On technology, he said efforts would be made to ensure the BVAS machine stores data to prevent interval reconfiguration of the machine by INEC.
The lawmaker, who said the electoral law does not mandate INEC to upload results on a portal, said they would mandate INEC to upload every result on the portal in the coming elections.
“We were in Lagos some days back for a retreat. By the 28th of this month, we are having another town hall meeting here in Abuja to ensure people bare their mind on the electoral laws.
“We, in the 10th Senate, will ensure laws are made to have positive impacts on the electoral process and our people. We want to ensure that by next year, we will have made lots of improvements,” he said.
Alli said that they would abridge the time for filing and concluding petitions, adding pre-election matters must be concluded before elections, while election matters are concluded before swearing-in.
The lawmaker said that the majority of Nigerians and INEC itself wants the commission unbundled in terms of functions, while every matter concerning the electoral process would be looked into to allow for more transparency in our electoral system.
