Information & Communication Technology Arena

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is considering the use of electronic voting system for the conduct of 2015 general elections to boost the credibility of the electoral process.

This is coming on the heels of assertion recently by the Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited (NigComSat) that it has developed an e-voting platform that can be adopted in the 2015 general elections and beyond.

Electronic voting (also known as e-voting) is a term encompassing several different types of voting, embracing both electronic means of casting a vote and electronic means of counting votes.

Professor Attahiru Jega, Inec chairman who was addressing members of the House Committee on Electoral Matters, on the activities of the commission last week, said Inec was being proactive in considering the possibility of electronic voting but said the final decision would depend on the parliament and their constituents across the country.

"Whatever we will do depends on what Nigerians wants. We need additional card readers that can be used for electronic voting. We can start piloting electronic voting machines on pilot basis to know if we will be able to use that in 2015," Jega said.

Jega said that though the 2011 election was not perfect, the commission was able to raise the bar and was prepared to make necessary improvement before the next major election in the country.

The Inec boss said there would also be need to embark on more reforms of the electoral process to take care of some of the lapses identified during and after the last elections.

According to him, events in the polity has shown that there would be need to further amend the Electoral Act to tally with one of the recommendations of the Justice Mohammed Uwais Panel on tackling electoral offences. He aligned with the recommendation of the Uwais Panel for the unbundling of INEC and the creation of an Electoral Offences Commission.

Jega disclosed that the creation of the proposed commission had become imperative given the huge volume of electoral offences recorded during the voter registration and the general elections last April. He said that whereas there were about 870,000 cases of multiple registration and thousands of other offences recorded during the elections, the commission had been able to commence prosecution of 200 offenders.