The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has explained why it did not use server for the transmission of electoral results in the 2019 general elections even though it was only used to experiment during some staggered elections held in 2018.The commission’s National Commissioner, Solomon Soyebi, who spoke today, June 17 during the post-election retreat organized for the staff and ad hoc staff gave reasons why the commission had to drop the idea of electronic transmission of the results to a central server.
Solomon Soyebi said that late release of INEC’s budget for the 2019 elections and controversies over the Electoral Act, among others reasons, forced the Commission to jettison the idea of using the technology to transmit results to the central server.
“We piloted the use of transmission of election results electronically in Sokoto, in Anambra, even in Osun. What happened was that we were trying to pilot to see the desirability of such technology in our electoral process.
“First, our budget came out very late, there was also issue (with) the Electoral Act. For these and some other reasons, the Commission did not adopt that option. 2019 elections were conducted according to Law.
“We used the Constitution of the Federal Republic; we used the Electoral Act and our guidelines for 2019 elections. If you look at the three instruments carefully, the issue of server was not highlighted.
“Once in a while, you will see an experiment going on but we have to pilot it before we will deploy wholesale for election. We did not use it because of circumstances beyond the control of the Commission.”
