No More Manipulation Of Results, INEC Tells Politicians

Politicians have been advised to refrain from engaging the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) staff to help them manipulate election results.

The resident electoral commissioner for Osun State, Dr. Mutiu Agboke, who gave the piece of advice during a courtesy visit to the Correspondents’ Chapel of Osun NUJ in Osogbo, noted that technology has made it impossible for any INEC staff to rig elections for anybody.

According to him, all other processes are technology-driven except for casting ballots, which prospective voters must perform manually.

In his words, “Over the years, the commission has been developing year in and Year out, election in and election out, and if you look at it from 2011 to date, the only thing that remains manual now is the actual casting of the ballot.

“The registration is technology, the accreditation is technology, the verification of accreditation is technology, and even the process of uploading the results is technology that is not collation.

“No INEC staff can assist anybody. Maybe people don’t know the technology today on election day. The deployment of material is being monitored on various platforms. Materials are moving from CBN to local government, and even in the morning, the time you are deploying your material is being monitored on the dashboard. These are the things we use technology to achieve.

Dr. Agboke dismissed the misconception in some quarters that IREV is a platform for collation of results saying that it was just a means to enable the general public to have access to what was going on.

He said, “The misconception in the public is that our opportunity of transparency which made us create the IREV platform is misinterpreted. IREV is not a platform for the collation, the actual collation is at the collation center but we want you to have access to see what we are doing.

“That is why we upload it at each stage, but people wanted to use that opportunity as a coalition platform. That generated all the noises you heard in the last election”.

He assured that INEC would continue to deepen the process through technology, adding that the commission was looking at various technology options that could be deployed to further enhance the electoral process in the country.