Tinubu says INEC not ready for electronic voting, transmission of results

Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has expressed no confidence in the decision of the National Electoral Commission to deploy the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV) for the 2023 election. 

“INEC is still yet to assure us during this election that electronic transmission, the technology being used for the accreditation and the total votes counts is reliable,  dependable and assuring in our democratic process before we introduce a complicated element of…ballot,” Mr Tinubu said on Monday.

The APC presidential candidate spoke at Chatham House in London as part of a strategy to expound on his plans for security, economy and foreign policy in the United Kingdom. 

His fresh opposition to the voting technology reinforced the position of the ruling party, which had earlier claimed that Nigeria was not yet ripe for the use of such technology in the 2023 poll. 

Speaking further before a diverse audience at the frontline UK think-tank, Mr Tinubu said he’s one of the politicians in Nigeria now losing confidence in the nation’s voting system with the introduction of the new technology ahead of the polls. 

“We are still losing confidence in our democratic and voting system,” he said. 

INEC had insisted that there was no going back on the deployment of the technology for the 2023 election exercise. 

Mahmud Yakubu, the chairman of the electoral body had said the introduction of BVAS and IRev, a technology to upload election results in real-time, was to ensure a free, fair and credible election. 

While there were alleged moves recently by some political actors in the country to prevail on the electoral umpire to drop the use of BVAS and return to the use of incident forms in the accreditation of voters in the next year’s poll, more Nigerians have embraced the technology and warned that discarding it could spell doom for the entire exercise.

Mr Tinubu’s appearance comes less than three months before the presidential and National Assembly election scheduled for February 25, 2023. The governorship and state elections would hold two weeks later on March 11.