Zinox boss commends Senate for passage of Electoral Act 2010 amendment

The Chairman of Zinox Group, Mr Leo Stan Ekeh, on Monday commended the Senate for passing the amendment to the Electoral Act 2010, which would legalise electronic voting in electoral processes.

Ekeh in a statement in Lagos said that Senate’s amendment of the Electoral Act of 2010 legalising the use of smart card readers for the authentication of accredited voters was a welcome development.

He called on the presidency to assent to the amendment of the Act to pave the way for electronic voting in future elections.

The passage of the bill for an act to amend the Electoral Act 2010 and other related matters just passed its third reading at the Senate.

It stipulates that votes and recorded results must be transmitted electronically directly from polling units in an encrypted and secured form.

The amendment provides that if for some reason the encrypted data is compromised, the presiding officer will have to rely on the manual collation, which can be prone to manipulation and where the encrypted data is safe, it completely supersedes the manual results.

Ekeh said that he had declared in May 2016 that the time was ripe for Nigeria to deepen its democratic culture through the full deployment of electronic voting during elections.

The digital entrepreneur said that he made the call as the keynote speaker at a retreat by the House of Representatives Committee on Electoral and Political Parties Matter held on May 27, 2016 in Abuja.

According to him, with the rapid pace of technological advancements, Nigeria stands to reap a lot of benefits from the deployment of e-voting.

“The initiative will go a long way in reducing litigation and strengthening the faith of Nigerians in the electoral process.

“The country is ripe for transition to electronic voting. In your life, there must be a little bit of disruption for you to move forward.

“With the use of the card readers in the last general elections, we saw a significant reduction in electoral fraud.

“However, a few challenges still existed as no technology can be said to be 100 per cent perfect,’’ he said.

Ekeh said that there were about 774 local governments in the country; each one having about 10,800 polling units, some of which were in the coastal areas.

He said that even if INEC purchased 1,000 vehicles, it would still find it difficult logistics-wise to cover all the areas, therefore, leaving the process open to manipulation by emergency contractors.

The Zinox chairman said that electronic voting would ensure that there was reasonable infrastructure to handle electoral processes.

According to him, while the mobile units and active screens are at the polling units, the database of registrants or eligible voters will be at the INEC national database.

“Once a voter’s number is entered at the polling unit, it pulls up the details of the voter from the list of registered voters.

“Verification will no longer be a problem and during voting, once a voter clicks on the icon of a chosen party, the same information hits the INEC back-end.

“This will go a long way in reducing litigations as INEC can provide verifiable evidence in court.

“With this technology in place, voters will no longer have to travel back to their wards to cast their votes.

“Furthermore, INEC can also monitor the entire process easily as each electronic voting device is equipped with a tracker and can be configured to shut down immediately voting ends.

“With the amendment, the presiding officer at polling units is empowered to use any other technological device that may be prescribed by the INEC from time to time for the accreditation of voters,’’ he said.

Ekeh said that it could be used to verify, confirm or authenticate the genuineness or otherwise of voters’ card.

He said that the amendment also offered a solution to the ambiguity that might occur in the event a candidate died after the commencement of elections and before the declaration of a winner by INEC.

“This was the case during the 2015 Kogi gubernatorial election,’’ he said.