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The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is gearing up for what may be Nigeria’s first fully electronically driven electoral process in 2023 following the signing into law, the new Electoral Act by President Muhammadu Buhari.
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The Regulations and Guidelines adopted by INEC prior to the 2019 general election allow the Commission to accredit voters electronically. In fact, Section 47 of the legalises the use of a smart card reader and other technological devices that are deployed by INEC. But the new makes its statutorily mandatory to rely on digital means for collation and transmission.
The 2023 elections will rely on the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS), a voting device that has replaced the smart card reader was used in the 2015 elections.
The new law empowers INEC to determine the procedure for voting at an election as well as the transmission of results; either electronically or manually.
Sections 18 and 19 stipulate that the accreditation is going to be “purely, wholly, and totally electronic.”
Also, the law empowers the Presiding Officer at a polling unit to cancel the results of the election in the polling unit where the number of vote casts surpasses the number of accredited voters in the polling units. The implication is that the inconclusiveness of elections is no more the total number of registered voters in the affected polling units, but the total number of PVCs that were collected in the affected polling units.
By virtue of Section 40, should the number of recorded votes be greater than the number of the accredited voters (that is, as recorded inside the BVAS device), then the elections in such affected polling-units is regarded as voided elections.
Malfunctioning BVAS
According to Section 20, if the BVAS Technology fails to complete the accreditation of a voter, the voter cannot participate in the election.
Section 23 stresses that a malfunctioning BVAS device must be replaced. If it could not be replaced within the day of the election, then the election in the affected polling unit must be postponed to continue the following day.
Willful obstruction to use of BVAS
Section 100-ii clearly says should there happen to be a willful obstruction or resistance to the use of the BVAS device in some of the polling units, such polling units shall be credited with zero votes during collation.
Even though there is going to be Electronic Collations and Electronic Transmissions (Section 38), there should also be Manual Collations and Manual Transmissions (Section 48) .
INEC will rely on Electronically Collated Results to check and verify the manually collated results before they are announced according to Section 51. This means as part of the safeguards to ensure thoroughness, transparency and accuracy of the process ,the Electronically Collated Results and the Electronically Transmitted Results from each levels of the electoral process, both voting and collation, as well as all the data that are contained inside the BVAS device, are all going to be crosschecked against manually collated results prior to INEC announcing the final results.
