Mr Festus Okoye, who is the Chairman, Information and Voter’s Education Committee at INEC has assured Nigerians that the Commission will carryout credible elections in 2023.
Mr. Okoye made this assurance in Abuja on Wednesday, at a 2-day workshop organised by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) of Germany, which had the theme: The 2022 Electoral Act: Emerging Challenges and Improvements.
The Chairman noted that the revised 2022 Electoral Act enhances INEC’s power to conduct hitch-free elections.
“There are so many new innovations in the new electoral framework that will assist and aid the Commission in conducting credible elections.
“The use of smart card readers and other electronic devices have been inputted into the electoral legal framework and the implication is that we can now confidently use them for accreditation.
“Not only that, the law has also made it specifically clear that what will now be used for measuring over-voting will be the data of accredited voters and no longer the number of persons on the voters’ register.
“That has also cleared the pathway and some of the big challenges we had previously.
“If there is a dispute relating to the results, the law now says that the collation officer will look at the manually collated result, look at the electronically transmitted results and look at the data from the beavers.
“The collation officer then uses them to resolve whatever problems there are.
“That for me is a very big improvement in our electoral process.
“The law has also tried to sanitise the regime of internal democracy in political parties. So, I think that is a plus in relation to internal democracy in political parties
“Also on the issue of collation of results, there is now a duality in terms of manually collated results and electronically transmitted results and if there is a challenge, there is a problem.
“We are confident that with some of the new improvements and some of the new innovations that have been introduced in the law, we have added advantage in terms of making sure that we organise a good elections,’’ Okoye said.
The 2023 Nigerian elections will be held on 25 February and 11 March 2023. During this presidential election year, the President and Vice President will be elected on 25 February.
