Results from the 5,634 polling units in today’s governorship election in Anambra State, will be uploaded to the viewing portal of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.
However, results collation would be done manually, as has been traditional with other elections in Nigeria.
INEC said that the innovation was first deployed in the August 8, 2020 Nasarawa Central State Constituency bye-election, and later in the Edo and Ondo states governorship elections held on September 19 and October 10, 2020, respectively.
In an interview with the Punch newspaper, Festus Okoye, INEC National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, said INEC converted 1,112 voting points to full-fledged polling units, bringing the total polling units in the state to 5,720.
Okoye said BVAS, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, newly introduced by the commission would more or less replace the card readers going forward and would be used for voter registration, accreditation and uploading polling unit results to the result-viewing portal.
In Okoye’s words, “BVAS allows us to use one machine for the purposes of voter registration, accreditation – fingerprint and facial authentication – and uploading of polling unit results to our result-viewing portal. So, it’s a three-in-one solution. We are confident that the BVAS will perform well and it will be the dominant means of accreditation going forward.
“The commission will upload polling unit level results to our INEC result-viewing portal. We are confident that our new technological approach to elections will continue to yield results. We have trained all the ad hoc staff that would use the BVAS and the implication is that we have more or less retired the smart card reader as equipment for voter accreditation.”
Okoye revealed that the BVAS had been dispatched to the local government areas since Thursday, and that the commission had the capacity to deal with any challenges that may arise in the course of using the technology.
The Anambra governorship election is seen by political pundits as straight fight between Chukwuma Soludo of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Andy Uba of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Valentine Ozigbo of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and Godwin Maduka of Accord Party.
