No Going Back on BVAS, IReV:2023 Election Must Be Credible and Transparent- INEC Tells Nigerians

….93.5 million Nigerians eligible to vote in the 2023 Elections

Maryam Aminu

Ahead of next year’s general election, the Independent National Election Commission (INEC), has promised transparency, credibility and fairness

Speaking at its third quarterly meeting with political parties, the INEC Chairman, Mahmud Yakubu said,
“There is no going back on the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV), in real-time on Election Day. There will be no Incident Form that enables ineligible persons to vote using other people’s Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) during elections. We are committed to ensuring that the 2023 general election is transparent and credible, reflecting the will of the Nigerian people.”He reminded that only last week, INEC commenced the training of master trainers on election technology to ensure a seamless process, adding that from Thursday, INEC will commence the same training at zonal levels and subsequently train all its ad hoc staff for the 176,846 polling units nationwide.

“On this note, let me once again reassure Nigerians that there is no going back on the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BVAS for voter accreditation. There is no going back on the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal IReV in real-time on Election Day.

Mahmud further disclosed that 93.5 million Nigerians are eligible to participate in the 2023 exercise as voters

Giving further details on how the commission arrived at the number of eligible voters, the INEC chairman said,
“At the end of the exercise, 12,298,944 Nigerians successfully completed the registration as new voters.
After a thorough cleaning-up of the data using the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), a total of 2,780,756 (22.6%) were identified as ineligible registrants and invalidated from the record, among them double/multiple registrants, underaged persons and outrightly fake registrations that fail to meet our rules.

The Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) Chairman, Engr. Yabagi Yusuf Sani who spoke on behalf of the political parties passed a vote of confidence on INEC Chairman for his innovations to reshape the electoral process.

The political parties specifically hailed the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BVAS and the INEC Result Viewing IReV Portal in the recently concluded elections in the country and for next year’s general election.

He said the IPAC leadership has also noted the spike in the use of divisive languages and hate speeches by several chieftains and spokespersons of some political parties in the mass media and at political rallies.

IPAC assured that the reprehensible, irresponsible and reckless utterances which are already heating up the polity with the potential of leading to the even more dangerous dimension of igniting mutual hate, animosity and violence along the nation’s existing tenuous fault lines is being addressed by IPAC.