The Transformation Monitoring Group (TMG) has decried the act of vote buying by politicians and political parties during last Saturday’s Ekiti State gubernatorial election, even as it commended the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the successful conduct of the polls.
The group, in a statement signed by its chairman, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, stated that the act of vote-buying was seen during the Ekiti Election.
According to him, using public funds to woo voters during elections has become common by politicians across the country.
Rafsanjani said: “Vote-buying was observed across the 16 local government areas of the state with political parties bidding for the votes of electorates.
“The ability of Ekiti politicians to make light of such a grave violation of extant law is most unfortunate. Transformation Monitoring Group condemns this blatant violation of the electoral law.”
The group also commended INEC for deploying Security operatives at the polling units on time and voters for their comportment at the various polling centres.
TMG also noted that priority voting was given to voters such as People Living With Disabilities (PLWDs), elderly persons and pregnant women in most of the polling units in the state.
The group said, “Reports from field observers indicate that it takes at least 3 minutes to accredit a voter using the BVAS in 41% of the locations observed. Going by this, the BVAS would have successfully accredited 20 voters per hour on the average in the affected voting locations.”
However, he noted that INEC’s strategy of voters’ redistribution failed to address the problem of over-concentration of voters in some polling units, thereby urging INEC on the need to double its effort to improve the turnaround time of the BVAS of one minute per voter for a seamless process on election day.
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