An election monitoring group, Yiaga Africa, has released preliminary reports, identifying late commencement of polls, poor functionality of the BVAS machines, communication glitches among other operational deficiencies that has characterised the ongoing FCT Council elections.
Samson Itodo, Executive Director, Yiaga Africa, who reeled out these challenges from their situation room as at 1:30pm on Saturday afternoon, attributed the late opening of polling stations to poor logistics and security problems.
He said polling officials encountered difficulty in locating assigned polling units, including late arrival of police officers at the registration area centres.
“For instance, several polling units in Abuja Municipal Area Council especially Gwarimpa and Orozo ward opened late as polling officials couldn’t deploy without security protection, on average accreditation and voting commenced at 10am in most polling units observed,” he noted.
On the functionality of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, Yiaga said its observation showed that in some cases the BVAS failed to authenticate both the fingerprints and facial biometrics of voters in some polling units.
The group also identified voter disenfranchisement as a result of missing names on the voter register, despite some voters having Permanent Voter Cards PVCs.
Yiaga Africa said it also observed that the imbalance in the distribution of voters to new polling units affected the effective management of polling units with over 1000 registered voters.
It said the development led to overcrowding in some polling units , while some other units had as many as 2500 registered voters, and a few having less than 5 voters within the same location.
Itodo explained that these inconsistencies question the reliability and accuracy of the Commission’s framework for the expansion of polling units.
“Inconsistent communication on election security: we saw with dismay the confusion created by the irregularity in the information from the security agencies on the restriction of movement.
“These inconsistent communication from security agencies undermines public confidence in the transparency and objectivity of security agencies during elections.
“Our preliminary recommendation is that given the late opening of polls and glitches with the BVAS machines, INEC should extend the voting time to 4:30 pm especially in polling units with a high turnout of voters.
“The operational deficiencies noted in this election provide a compelling need for a comprehensive audit of the voter register, BVAS technology, elections logistics and distribution of voters to polling units. Again INEC officials should act in the utmost sense of integrity, transparency and professionalism in the collation and declaration of election results,” the election monitoring group posited.
