The Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation (NIDO) has expressed displeasure with failure of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to ensure instantaneous transmission of results to IReV at the conclusion of voting at polling units as originally planned for the 2023 general elections.
NIDO chairman Americas Dr. Ezekiel Macham and his counterpart in Europe, Dr. Bashir Obasekola, stated this while addressing news men in Jos on the report of the 2023 election observers mission of Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation worldwide and advised INEC and all the pertinent stakeholders to take urgent action to address this lapses identified with a view to improving the conduct of subsequent elections.
They said it is very important that as they move into future elections, INEC must seek an amendment to the Electoral Act to allow electronic transmission and automated collation through direct submission of results in numerical format from the polling units into the INEC server.
NIDO worldwide deployed 57 election observers to polling units in selected towns and locations in Enugu, Lagos, Plateau, Ogun, Benue, Kaduna, Cross River, Delta, Edo states and the Federal Capital Territory.
They pointed out that the submitted results must be free of human intervention, which occurs by way of the manual addition of numbers while the automated tallied results should be live and accessible to the nation as the voting progresses, adding that the scanned hard copy evidence of Form EC8A transmitted via BVAS will be used only to back-up the raw data submitted from the polling units. They commended the 9th assembly on the new Electoral Act.
