Joash Amupitan, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), says the commission will conduct a nationwide mock accreditation and voting exercise on November 28.
Speaking on Thursday during a dialogue at the Chatham House
in London, Amupitan said INEC had addressed malfunctions of the Bimodal Voter
Accreditation System (BVAS) linked to extreme heat and storage conditions
during the 2023 elections.
The dialogue was convened in partnership with the Kimpact
Development Initiative (KDI) and themed, “Nigeria’s 2027 elections: democratic
trajectory and regional stability beyond the ballot”.
According to a statement by Adedayo Oketola, his chief press
secretary, Amupitan said Nigerians should trust his leadership to deliver free,
fair, and credible general election in 2027.
“On the 28th of this month, we will conduct a mock
accreditation and voting exercise across all states of the federation to
simulate the presidential election and verify that we have gotten both
accreditation and electronic result transmission right,” Amupitan said.
The INEC chairman highligthed the commission’s measurable
operational improvements in recent off-cycle polls.
He added that INEC had introduced new technical safeguards
to prevent a repeat of the controversies that marred the 2023 elections.
Amupitan said the commission had also procured additional
devices and reduced the maximum number of voters assigned to each BVAS machine
from 1,250 to 850.
He said polling units with more than 850 registered voters
would be provided with multiple devices.
According to him, INEC’s post-2023 audit traced the most
acute result-management failures to collation centres rather than polling
units.
To eliminate discrepancies between polling unit figures and
collation sheets, Amupitan said INEC had built strict validation safeguards
into its system to prevent inaccurate results and figures indicating
over-voting from being uploaded to the INEC result viewing portal (IReV).
“We found that the core problem of election result
management and declaration in Nigeria is not even at the polling unit — it is
at the collation centres,” he said.
“In 2023, there were instances of inaccurate results or
results with over-voting being uploaded onto IReV. We have now devised a
technical safeguard: if a result is not accurate at the polling unit, it will
not go to IReV at all.
“The moment a result appears on IReV, citizens can trust
what they see. By eliminating inconsistencies at the source, collation will
become a transparent formality.”
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