A few things to expect and some form of voting education for the millions of Nigerians that will be trooping to the various polling centres nationwide in a few hours from now.
A voter on arriving the polling station on Saturday will meet a team of between four and five polling officers. The voter will, on arrival, join the queue for accreditation and when it gets to his or her turn, the voter will handover the Permanent Voter’s Card, PVC to an assistant presiding officer, APO, whose duty it is to check the authenticity of the card using the card reader.
The card reader will prop up the bio-data of the voter including his picture and fingerprints if they are genuine. If they are not, the prospective voter is advised to immediately leave the polling area as the rules require the presiding officer to immediately handover the person to the police if he or she refuses to leave.
If the card reader authenticates the voter as having a valid INEC voter’s card, he will be taken through the next step of the accreditation process which is the biometrics. This is done by placing either the index finger or thumb at the top of the card reader for the purpose of matching the fingerprint with the one embedded in the voter card. If it matches, the card reader will pop up a sound to affirm so.
However, if the card reader does not read the finger print, the presiding officer will issue the prospective voter an incident form where the voter will put down his or her details.
At the end of accreditation officially by 1.00 pm, voting will begin and the supervisory presiding officer and his assistants will then arrange the voters in an orderly manner starting from the first person to arrive the voting area.
The voter will mention the number which was given to him or her during the accreditation and this will guide the presiding officer to check the INEC register to cross check that it was still the same person that was accredited that has turned up to vote.
If confirmed that the person was the same person accredited earlier, the presiding officer will issue him a ballot paper to go and exercise his franchise.
The Assistant Polling Officer (APO) who has the responsibility of issuing the ballot papers to the voter will issue three ballot papers, one red for the presidential; black for the Senate election and green for the House of Representatives election.
At the end of the voting, the INEC officials would first ensure that all the ballot papers for the three elective offices are sorted together. Ballots that were mistakenly put in the wrong boxes would be sorted into the correct boxes and then the votes for each of the candidates would be counted. At the end of the exercise, the results would be displayed in a conspicuous place around the station while a copy would be taken to the collation center at the ward level.
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