The Chief Press Secretary to the INEC Chairman, Mr Kayode Idowu, has assured Nigerians that the Osun election would be an improvement on what was witnessed in Ekiti State.
On the Friday edition of Sunrise Daily on Channels Television, he expressed confidence in the electoral body’s preparation and “rigging proof” measures towards ensuring a credible Osun election and also gave assurances that the template created during the Ekiti State governorship election has since been improved upon.
One of such is in the area of logistics. He explained that during the Ekiti State election, 95.6% of the polling units opened by 8am and the commission hopes “to go beyond that” in the Osun election.
Channels Television correspondent had earlier reported that the farthest of the communities in Osun State were within 30 minutes’ drive from the state capital and this is expected to make logistics much easier for the electoral body.
Mr Idowu corroborated this by saying that the commission had made further logistic arrangements and had done “everything humanly possible to have a seamless operation and so far things are going on well”
Although, he admitted that Osun presents a bigger challenge as it has 30 Local Government Areas, unlike Ekiti which has 16. He also explained some of the logistic innovations of the commission, including the setting up of Super Registration Centre Areas, which are centrally located schools where officials camp overnight to enable them deploy early for the polling units.
There had been an allegation by one of the political parties that another party was making plans to rig the election, our correspondence noted that it appeared that they had details of the plan as they presented a document to back the claims.
Mr Idowu said that INEC would not connive with any political party and if there were any proofs that plans existed to rig the Osun election, it would be dealt with by the Commission.
Mr Idowu also explained the Commission’s decision to use colour codes for the ballot papers. He said that this would help curtail the chances of remote thumb printing as each polling unit would have its peculiar colour which would not be acceptable in another unit.
On the stakeholders meeting held earlier in the week, the INEC man expressed hope that the meeting would have laid to rest some of the issues that the electoral body had with political parties. He cited the example of certain electoral rules and regulations which some persons were encouraging their supporters to break.
He said that it amounts to illegality for any voter to snap pictures of the ballot paper or thumb printed potion as being advised by a political party. He added that no camera is allowed to film a voter while thumb-printing and this includes the media.
The issue of the voters cards being cloned was also mentioned and Mr Idowu asserted that INEC’s procedures were such that if anybody clones a card, it would be useless, as it was printed based on an optimized process which means it is personalized with the owner’s biometric data. He added that the Commission has also rejected proxy distribution and also enforced the owner of every card signing during collection and all these were measures to ensure the success of the Osun polls.
“The voters’ card has your picture, its like the drivers license”, he said, as he maintained that anyone who gets hold of another person’s voters card would not be able to use it.
Mr Kayode Idowu also went ahead to reel out the procedures involved in the voting process.
