Adebayo Balogun, Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Electoral Matters, has said the Independent National Electoral Commission cannot use real-time election results transmitted to its IReV portal for collation under the Electoral Act Bill.
The lawmaker stated this during an interview on the proposed bill on an Arise TV programme on Thursday.
He noted that none of the bill version passed by both the upper and lower legislative chambers allows INEC to collate from results uploaded on the IReV portal.
Mr Balogun maintained that the INEC’s Form EC8A, also known as the manual statement of the poll results from polling units, would remain the only means to collate from, a clause that could render results uploaded to IReV unusable in case of discrepancies if passed into law.
“From the two versions, there is none of it that says that the results of the IReV would be one to be used. It is still the form EC8A,” Mr Balogun said.
He added that the difference between the versions of the bill passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives would be rectified by “a committee made up of all the parties and not just the ruling party.”
Clause 60(3) of the version passed by the House of Representatives stated that “The Commission shall electronically transmit the results from each polling unit to IReV portal in real-time and such transmission shall be done simultaneously with the physical collation of results.”
The Senate also okayed mandatory transmission of election results electronically in its version but made room for Form EC8A use to collate election results in cases where electronic transmission fails due to network glitches.
