The Independent National Electoral Commission is deploying an electronic collation system to reduce malpractices in the 2019 general elections.
INEC’s Director of Information and Communication Technology, Chidi Nwafor, said this last week at a media conference in Abuja.
In his presentation, Nwafor pointed ou the weakness of current collation system which involves manual transmission of results sheets from polling units to collation cnetres where manipulations take place.
a fellow of Nigerian Society of Engineers who supervised the deployment of permanent voters’ cards and smart readers for the 2015 elections.
‘The challenge has been after the poll – between the polling units and the collation centres and at the collation centre.
“INEC has therefore decided to securely transmit results from all polling units to central database such that only viewing access is allowed at the wards and local government levels – which ultimately eliminates manual collation processes,” he said.
According to the fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, the system workings include
1. Entering results from polling units into the e-collation application on the smart card reader;
2. Transmission of results to a central server;
3. Auto-collation of results to be viewed at the RAs (wards) and ECA8s can be scanned at that level; and
4. Result audit and confirmation takes place at collation centres at LGAs, state and national level.
The new system could be used for all elections, from local council polls which INEC conducts in the Federal Capital Territory to the presidential election.
“A flexible dashboard to with a real-time user interface showing graphical presentation of status of results collated per given time,” he said.
INEC said the new system would be first deployed for the November 2017 Anambra State governorship election as pilot phase.
“INEC is preparing for the 2019 elections and is further deploying technology to improve its service delivery and make its processes less prone to manipulations,” said Nwafor.
The chairman of the commission, Mohammed Yakubu, said the commission had been meeting with security, intelligence and military agencies to improve security of elections in Nigeria.