The Chairman of the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) Electoral Monitoring Committee, Dafe Akpedeye (SAN) has praised the new tactics employed by the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) in ensuring a hitch-free election.

Speaking to Channels Television in Awka, Akpedeye said: “INEC keeps tweaking things and try to get them better. One of the challenges we have had is the issue of ballot snatching” adding that “you could snatch a ballot box and take it to another unit and it could go back”.

He further noted that “what INEC has done is that they tied each ballot box to a particular polling unit, so if you took a ballot box away, the chance of you getting it back to that polling unit is next to nothing and that is why you haven’t seen any issue of ballot box snatching today”.

He also noted that about 700, 000 persons were tweaked out of the voter register because they “didn’t do their due process” thereby pruning the number of voters from 2.4 million to 1.7 million.

Akpedeye further noted that “INEC keeps thinking of better ways of doing things” insisting that “the challenges are still there”.

He however berated the late arrival of voting materials to the polling units saying; “I would have thought we would be able to seamlessly deliver voting materials for the voters latest by 9AM”.

He noted that the bad state of the roads made traveling from one spot to the other took quite more than normal.

Money Exchanging Hands

An election observer, Festus Okoye, confirmed that there was an exchange of money between the voters and representatives of the candidates.

He however noted that those who collected the money claimed they were getting back their money.

“The money belongs to us (voters) so we are going to collect it and still vote in accordance with pure conscience,” the voters were quoted as saying..

Okoye praised the attitude of INEC officials and voters in the polling unit he monitored but maintained that “there are operational and logistics challenges that INEC must overcome”.