The Independent National Electoral Commission on Monday ruled out the possibility of adopting electronic transmission of results for the 28 rerun elections scheduled for January 25.
The commission said it would adopt the manual process of transmitting results in the rerun elections to be conducted in one Senatorial District, 12 federal constituencies and 15 state constituencies.
The Chief Press Secretary to the INEC chairman, Rotimi Oyekanmi, stated these in an interview.
He was reacting to enquiries whether the commission would experiment the process before the 2023 general election.
Oyekanmi said, “That (electronic transmission) is against the law and we can’t do what is against the law.
“Electronic transmission (of results) has not been approved by the National Assembly.
“So we are still going to use the manual process that we have been using.
“That is my understanding of the whole process. Before you can apply any innovation, you must get approval from the appropriate authorities, this time the National Assembly.”
The PUNCH had reported that INEC National Commissioner and chairman of its Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, had explained how the commission arrived at the 28 rerun elections.
He had said, “After consideration of several issues surrounding the rerun elections, including the time needed for preparations, establishing the details of the affected areas from court judgments as well as the intervention of the Yuletide, the commission has decided to hold all the 28 outstanding court-ordered rerun elections on Saturday, January 25, 2020.
“There are, so far, 30 such court-ordered rerun and supplementary rerun elections.
“Two of these namely, the rerun election for the Ajaokuta Federal Constituency and the supplementary rerun election for the Kogi West Senatorial District were conducted on November 30 2019.
“Consequently, there are 28 court-ordered elections still outstanding which are distributed across 12 states of the Federation. The breakdown comprises one Senatorial District out of 109, 12 Federal Constituencies out of 360 and 15 State Assembly Constituencies out of 991.”
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