The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has disclosed that the late release of budget by the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government affected the deployment of servers for the 2019 general elections.
INEC’s National Commissioner in Osun State, Solomon Soyebi, however, admitted that the commission once experimented the electronic transmission of results but it was not deployed in the 2019 general elections.
Soyebi, in a statement he issued, explained that the commission only experimented the use of a server in the Anambra, Sokoto and Osun elections.
According to Soyebi: “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.
“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.
“First, our budget came out very late. There was also (an) issue (with) the Electoral Act. For these and some other reasons, the commission did not adopt that option; 2019 elections were conducted according to the 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 the server was not highlighted.”