Centus Nweze ReportingÂ
An election monitoring group under the auspices of Centre for Transparency Advocacy, CTA, has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of not doing enough to inform voters that have been migrated to other polling units.
According to the group, such information was necessary in order not to create confusion on the day of election proper.09
“CTA believes that lack of publicity and mobilisation was a major factor that contributed to cases of low turn out of voters during the exercise, hence, we advise INEC to drastically address the issue.
“We observed that INEC officials and security agents did not allow observers access to the polling units and accreditation centers because they did not have INEC tags. For us, this was not supposed to be the case since INEC did not and have not issued tags for this exercise, rather the accreditation letters carried by the observers should have suffixed,” the electoral monitoring body stated.6]
The suggestions was a fall out of CTA’s observation at the recent Mock Trial of BVAS and Accreditation exercise preparatory to the 2023 general elections.
CTA’s Executive Director, Faith Nwadishi in a press conference on Monday in Abuja, however commended INEC on its level of preparations, saying reports from across the States indicate that, the accreditation exercise was peaceful and successful but more awareness needs to be created on those that were migrated to other polling units.
“Observers and voters that participated strongly believe that the deployment of the B-VAS will greatly check-mate vote buying especially on election day.
“It is also believed that the BVAS will eliminate the incidents of ballot snatching,” she stated.
The Center noted that in most polling units that were observed, the accreditation process was peaceful and no chaos was recorded as most of the machines were functional and reliable.
The CTA further recommended among other things that more sensitisation on the use of the BVAS and relocation of names to decongest the PUs, proper enlightenment and training of party agents, more sensitization of security agents on the dos and don’ts at PUs on election day and the rights of Observers among others.
According to her, BVAS took between 1-2 mins for accreditation of voters and that the BVAS easily recognized any form of double accreditation by alerting that, the individual had been accredited earlier.
She acknowledged that the BVAS is an improvement over the card reader aimed at reducing electoral malpractice in Nigeria.
The process was generally smooth and peaceful but the turn out of prospective voters was relatively poor due to low publicity and mobilization”, the CTA Boss stated.
The group also lamented that many people were not aware of the mock exercise leading to a low turnout in some areas.
It equally alleged that there was a misconception that officials wanted to use the exercise to copy their PVC numbers so that they would not be able to vote on election day. Noting that this should not have happened if there was adequate awareness creation in the communities.
With less ten days to the conduct of the presidential election, Nwadishi admonished Nigerians and all other stakeholders to support INEC towards achieving credible, peaceful, fair, inclusive, and conclusive elections in 2023.