Festus Okoye, a national commissioner at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has explained how the commission would make the results of March 18 subnational elections available on its result-viewing portal.

Okoye, who doubles as the voter education committee chairman, spoke to the controversy trailing the commission’s performance in the February 25 elections. He said the commission had learned “valuable lessons from previous elections that we conducted”.

He gave this explanation while appearing on Arise TV on Friday.

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“The law as of today prescribes a dual mode of either transmission of results or transfer of results,” The PUNCH quoted Okoye to have said.

According to him, the process of transmission is systematic in that a presiding officer, after the close of voting, would record the figures received by parties on form EC8A, sign it and allow party agents to countersign the same before upload.

He also said that accreditation data resulting from the results would be uploaded alongside the result sheets. Election officials would then move to the registration area for the collation officer to see for himself the original result sheet.

“The PO will sign that particular result sheet and stamp it. The PU agent or party agent, if available, will also countersign, and copies will be given to them and the police,” said Okoye.

“That original result will be what will be scanned and uploaded to our INEC Result-Viewing Portal for public viewing. Not only that, the accreditation data that has arisen from that polling unit will also be uploaded, but the physical result and the BVAS itself will also be taken to the registration area collation centre.

“The commission is determined to improve on its previous performance. What we have done is to learn valuable lessons from previous elections that we conducted, and we’re going to put those lessons into our planning purposes and processes, and into our deployment purposes.

“As of today, what we’re having is what we call state assembly and governorship elections.

“In all the states of the federation, both the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines and all the sensitive election materials have left the Central Bank and the various state offices of the federation.

“We want to ensure that all polling units open on time. Secondly, we made sure that we reconfigured all the BVAS that would be used for this particular election in terms of making sure that the BVAS perform optimally and also making sure that some of the challenges we had in the previous elections do not reoccur.

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“It’s a huge election, and INEC will be paying very close attention to what is going on in the various states.”