2023: INEC chairman at Chatham House, speaks on use of technology during polls

Nigeria’s electoral commission, INEC, has said it will be deploying several technological tools to predict and mitigate election violence, verify political party spending and monitor electoral materials from procurement through storage to delivery.

INEC Chairperson, Mahmood Yakubu, disclosed this while speaking at the Chatham House, London, on Tuesday. He spoke on the commission’s preparation towards Nigeria’s general election coming up in less than 40 days.

The presidential and the National Assembly elections will hold on 25 February while the governorship and State Assembly elections come up on 11 March.

The commission has repeatedly said it is prepared to hold the elections and does not foresee any change in the scheduled timeline of activities.

Apart from the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal to be used in voter accreditation and result viewing during the election, Mr Yakubu listed other technologies to be deployed by the commission to ensure a credible and transparent elections.

Electoral Operations, Procurement and Logistics

INEC has developed an android and web-based Logistics Management System to monitor the movement of election materials from procurement through storage to delivery, Mr Yakubu said.

He said the commission, for the first time, has a comprehensive Election Logistics Framework (ELF) “to guide logistics for the general elections from planning, through deployment to retrieval. This is the first deployment of an end-to-end logistics framework for elections.”

He added that the commission has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the umbrella bodies of road transport and marine unions to ensure the smooth and safe delivery of materials before, during and after the elections.

This, he said, was to deal with all the noticed bottlenecks to ensure more efficient and timely delivery of materials to polling units.

Violence Mitigation and Risk Management tools

With increased attacks on the commission’s facilities and insecurity across regions in the country, Mr Yakubu said the commission and partners have developed the Election Violence Mitigation and Advocacy Tool (EVMAT) and the Election Risk Management Tool (ERM).

While EMVAT is a research and diagnostic tool for predicting and mitigating election violence before elections, he said the ERM tracks and reports general risks to elections.

“There is no doubt that violence and threat of violence are major challenges to credible election in 2023,” he said. “In all, we feel assured by the actions we have taken and our collaboration with the security agencies. The 2023 general election will proceed as planned. There is no plan to postpone the election.”

Campaign Finance and Vote Buying

Political parties have in the past exploited INEC’s ‘tardy and unorganised’ frameworks of vetting campaign finances, to breach campaign funding and spending limits provided by the law, he said.

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To strengthen the mechanism, Mr Yakubu said INEC has developed a web-based application, the Political Parties Financial Reporting and Auditing System (PFRAS), for political parties to submit their expenditure for verification.

“We shall be deploying it soon and will train both our staff and political parties on its use,” he said.

Qosim Suleiman is a reporter at Premium Times in partnership with Report for the World, which matches local newsrooms with talented emerging journalists to report on under-covered issues around the globe