INEC Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu

When Festus Okoye, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, appeared on Arise TV today, he revealed how the governorship election results of 18th March would be relayed.

“The law as of today prescribes a dual mode of either transmission of results or transfer of results,” Okoye said.

He added that when polls closed at the level of the various units, “the Presiding Officer who superintended the polling unit would enter the scores of the various political parties in form EC8A which is the polling unit level result. “The PO will sign that particular result sheet and stamp it, the PU agent or party agent if available will also countersign and copies will be given to them and the police.

“That original result will be what will be scanned and uploaded to our INEC Result Viewing Portal for public viewing. Not only that, the accreditation data that has arisen from that polling unit will also be uploaded, but the physical result and the BVAS itself will also be taken to the Registration Area Collation centre.

“The commission is determined to improve on its previous performance. What we have done is to learn valuable lessons from previous elections that we conducted, and we’re going to put those lessons into our planning purposes and processes, and into our deployment purposes,” Okoye said.

“As of today, what we’re having is what we call state assembly and governorship elections.

“In all the states of the federation, both the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines and all the sensitive election materials have left the Central Bank and the various state offices of the federation.

“We want to ensure that all polling units open on time. Secondly, we made sure that we reconfigured all the BVAS that will be used for this particular election in terms of making sure that the BVAS perform optimally and also making sure that some of the challenges we had in the previous elections do not reoccur.”

“It’s a huge election and INEC will be paying very close attention to what is going on in the various states.”