Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu, has said that to improve the electoral processes in the country the Commission plans to implement the introduction of electronic balloting in future elections.
Yakubu said the commission intends to begin this during the Anambra elections, taking place in 2021.
“The commission is committed to introducing at least electronic balloting in the major election we are going to conduct next year, which happens to be the Anambra governorship election and thereafter, with the support of the National Assembly, we hope that the legal environment will improve such that we can also go ahead to collate and transmit results electronically.”
The INEC boss said this on Tuesday during a town hall meeting tagged Fixing Nigerian Elections, adding that “at present, the law doesn’t permit that because the system is essentially manual”.
He made the comments while responding to a question about what he would like to improve about the electoral system in the country.
“There are quite a number of issues, one of which is the deployment of technology,” the INEC boss said.
“We would like a situation where the electoral legal environment is reformed in such a manner that will continue to deepen the deployment of technology in elections.
“I am happy with what the commission has done since 2010. Recall that there is a trajectory. We started in 2010 with the biometric register of voters and so in 2011, the Commission essentially updated the biometric register and we did the same thing in 2014 and in 2017 and in 2018 over a period of 16 months in which we added 14.2 million Nigerians to the register.
“The second is biometric accreditation of voters and there was an innovation introduced in 2015, the smart card readers that go along with the permanent voters’ card.
“We have achieved that. We are looking forward (particularly with the 2015 amendment) to the electoral Act that empowers the commission to deepen the use of technology, in voting, particularly in the era of electronic voting, to see how far we can go a notch higher,” he added. Channelstv