Kogi, Imo, Bayelsa Election Results To Be Uploaded On IReV, REC Maintains
…5.4m Voters Registered For Kogi, Imo, Bayelsa Polls – INEC
The Bayelsa Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) Obo Effanga maintains that polling unit results will be uploaded on the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) for the Bayelsa, Kogi, and Imo governorship polls.
While the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Mahmood Yakubu had reportedly said results won’t be uploaded on the IReV, Effanga maintained that the electoral body will be deploying it for the off-season elections billed for November 11th, 2023.
“The IReV has come to stay just like the BVAS has come to stay. IReV was first used in 2020 by INEC. It is the INEC result viewing portal. It is a portal where polling unit results are uploaded – photos of the polling unit results. INEC has been doing that since 2020 and will continue to do that,” he said on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.
According to him the portal is ready and was used in the recent mock accreditation held ahead of the elections. He is confident that with the deployment of technology, the polls will be hitch-free.
“Yes, it is ready to go. Yesterday when we had the mock accreditation, we used the IReV portal to upload information from the mock accreditation. In the locations where we did the accreditation, people came and got accreditation. That information was recorded on the BVAS – that is the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System,” Effanga added.
“At the end of it, we also had a mock result sheet which we also used the BVAS to take a photograph of, and that was uploaded on the IReV.”
His comment came months after Nigeria conducted its general election. While INEC had promised to immediately transmit photos of polling unit results on IReV – an online platform and using BVAS – the electoral umpire failed to do so.
Instead, the results took days to weeks before getting on the portal with the agency blaming technical glitches.
The development became a talking point in the wake of the presidential election with opposition candidates claiming the poll was not credible. They pinned it – among others – on INEC’s failure to upload the results on IReV as it earlier promised.
But the Presidential Election Petition Court dismissed their petitions about IReV, saying the electoral umpire can use any method it deems fit to collate results. It thus affirmed President Bola Tinubu’s February victory.
5.4m Voters Registered For Kogi, Imo, Bayelsa Polls – INEC
Meanwhile, The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has disclosed that approximately 5.4 million voters have been registered ahead of the upcoming November 11 governorship elections in Kogi, Bayelsa, and Imo States.
This was made known in a statement on Tuesday by INEC’s National Commissioner of Chairman of the organization’s Information and Voter Education Committee, Sam Olumekun.
“The Commission held its regular meeting today, Tuesday 10th October 2023 and, among other issues, reviewed preparations for the off-cycle Governorship elections in Bayelsa, Imo and Kogi States.
“For the forthcoming elections, there are 1,056,862 registered voters in Bayelsa State; 2,419,922 in Imo State; and 1,932,654 in Kogi State, making a combined total of 5,409,438 registered voters for the three states,” Olumekun said.
According to him, political parties running in the elections will receive soft copies of the entire voter register for each state.
The National Commissioner added that “In Bayelsa State, 16 political parties are sponsoring candidates; in Imo State, 17; and in Kogi State, all 18 parties are sponsoring candidates.
“State Chairmen of political parties or their designated representatives are invited to attend the event, which will take place at the Collation Centers in the State Headquarters of the Commission in Lokoja, Owerri, and Yenagoa on Thursday 12th October 2023 at 10.00 am,” he said.
Olumekun added that as part of the commission’s ongoing commitment to furthering the use of technology for voter accreditation and result management, planning for mock voter accreditation in the three states has been completed to test the functionality of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the upload of polling unit results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
According to the National Commissioner, the exercise will be conducted concurrently in the three states on Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., adding that the list of designated polling units for each state has been uploaded to its website and social media platforms.
The commission also implored registered voters to participate in the election by showing up at the polls with their Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs).
