On March 18, Nigerians will vote in the gubernatorial and State House of Assembly elections, but not many of them will trust the electoral body.
The experience of Nigerians in the presidential and National Assembly elections was not a palatable one.
Indeed, to many of them, the electoral body failed to keep its promise of a credible election.
Now, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is assuring Nigerians that it has learnt several important lessons from the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections.
After the presidential and National Assembly elections, opposition parties and Nigerians in general blasted INEC.
This was because their employees at the polling units failed to electronically transmit election results to the Result Viewing Portal (IReV) as planned.
Also, the parties rejected the manual counting of results and the announcement of the elections’ winners.
The governorship and State House of Assembly elections, originally scheduled for March 11 were moved to March 18.
INEC says the postponement would allow for the BVAS machine reconfiguration after getting court permission.
Valuable Lessons
In an interview on Channels Television on Monday, Festus Okoye, the national commissioner for INEC, says “the commission is making extensive efforts to address problems with IReV before the elections on March 18″.
Okoye declares that “valuable lessons” would be applied to the upcoming weekend’s elections for the State House of Assembly and governorship elections.
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Okoye claims that the IT division of the commission now knows what to do if there are issues with the uploading of polling unit results for the March 18 elections on the IReV portal.
BVAS Reconfiguration
According to Okoye, the results of more than 170,000 polling units from the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25 have been uploaded to the platform.
He added that the reconfiguration of the BVAS would be completed on Tuesday in time for the March 18 elections.
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“I’m sure that by Tuesday when we hope to complete the resettling of the BVAS for the governorship and state assembly elections, the results in all the places where elections were conducted would have been pushed to the accreditation backend,” he said.
