AmanaOnline

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is continuing with its efforts to improve the commission’s deployment of technologies in conducting elections in the country.

The commission on August 6 introduced a dedicated online portal, INEC Result Viewing (IRV), that will enable Nigerians view results from polling units in real-time on election days.

The electoral umpire had last week in Benin, the Edo State capital, said it would deploy a new technology called Z-pad, which will only serve as biometric accreditation using the photographs of voter’s fingerprints.

The Z-pad was deployed at the August 8 Nasarawa central constituency bye-election as a test-run but faced challenges. INEC has, however, explained that tablet cameras would only be used to take photos of the polling unit EC8A result sheets for the Saturday elections.

The INEC national commissioner for voter education, Festus Okoye, had said the commission is determined to address all concerns by voters through enhancing the level of transparency in the conduct of elections, especially in the process of releasing results of elections.

So what’s new?

The real-time posting of the election results, as stated by INEC, simply entails posting and uploading photographs of the EC8A/EC8A(VP), EC60, 40H forms results in PDF versions from polling units of a particular election held in a given state.

For instance, if it were the general elections, the IVR would contain the results coming from all the 119,973 polling units and 57,000 voting points across the country. The same would happen for other off-circle elections and subsequent bye-elections that would be conducted by INEC.

At the close of voting at a particular polling unit, the presiding officer sorts and counts the ballots and records the votes of candidates in both figures and words in the appropriate forms EC60E, EC8A, EC 40H(I)