Electronic/Manual Transmission: Here’s all you need to know about how they work and how they’ll be used in the 2023 elections
Ahead of the 2023 general election, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has maintained its decision on the electronic transmission of election results. The legal framework that empowers INEC to transmit election results is contained in the 2022 Electoral Bill, signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari on February 25, 2022.
However, voting during the 2023 election, scheduled for February 25 and March 14, 2023, for the Presidential and Gubernatorial election respectively, will be manual. As such, after accreditation with the Permanent Voters Card (PVC) using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), a device that will determine eligibility, the voter will be issued the ballot paper where they will manually choose their preferred candidate.
Since Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999, there has been demand from Nigerians for the implementation of electronic voting, a process many believe will mitigate electoral malpractices. Notably, there have been, in the last 12 years, steps by the electoral body to actualise full electronic voting, which the commission said in 2021, could be achieved in four steps. The first was the building of a robust biometric register of voters which commerced in the build-up of the 2011 election and has successfully registered over 90 million voters. The second track towards full electronic voting is the electronic accreditation of voters. In 2015, the Commission introduced the Permanent Voters Card (PVC), with a chip that contains the electorate’s biometric which will be read during accreditation by the Smart Card Reader (SCR). The Smart Card Reader was also introduced in 2015. The third and fourth track is Electronic Balloting and the Electronic Transmission and Collation of results. Even with the adoption of e-transmission, INEC in August 2022, said that election results will be manually collated.
“There is a marked difference between the electronic transmission of results and the collation of results,” Festus Okoye, INEC’s National Commissioner, and Chairman of its Information and Voter Education Committee said on August 20, 2022.
Balloting in the 2023 election remains manual. After accreditation, the voter will be issued a stamped ballot paper. As usual, the ballot paper would contain the list of parties contesting the elections, and the voter is expected to vote for their preferred candidate.
Since voting is manual, the collation of election results in the polling units remains manual. At the end of voting, the presiding officer is required to sort the ballot papers according to parties and thereafter loudly count the valid votes scored by each political party in the presence of the Polling Agents and Accredited Observers. The number of votes scored by each candidate is then entered in the appropriate Form EC8, provided by INEC.
Results are then transmitted electronically after collations. On completion of voting and collation of results, the Presiding Officer is mandated by the Electoral Act to Electronically transmit or transfer the results of the Polling Unit directly to the collation system. Also, the EC8A form, which contains the number of votes scored by each candidate, will be scanned and uploaded to the Result Viewing Portal (IReV) alongside the number of accreditated voters recorded in the BVAS.
“The implication of this is that the collation process of results is still essentially manual, but the collation officer must collate subject to his verification and confirmation that the number of accredited voters stated on the collated results are correct and consistent with the number of accredited voters recorded and transmitted directly from polling units,” Okoye said.
