The Independent National Electoral Commission has said it would ensure the glitches that occurred during the February 25 elections would not repeat themselves in the governorship elections across the country on Saturday.
INEC noted that election materials would arrive at the polling units early enough on Saturday.
INEC Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, while speaking on Arise TV on Friday said the commission had learnt valuable lessons from the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections.
The PUNCH reports that controversy trailed the failure of INEC to upload results as early as possible during the presidential election, with major opposition parties such as the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour party holding on to this as one of the bases for rejecting the presidential poll result where Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress was declared as the winner by the Commission.
“The commission is determined to improve on its previous performance. What we have done is to learn valuable lessons from previous elections that we conducted, and we’re going to put those lessons into our planning purposes and processes, and into our deployment purposes,” Okoye said.
Speaking on the commission’s preparedness, Okoye said, “As of today, what we’re having is what we call state assembly and governorship elections.
“In all the states of the federation, both the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines and all the sensitive election materials have left the Central Bank and the various state offices of the federation.
We want to ensure that all polling units open on time. Secondly, we made sure that we reconfigured all the BVAS that will be used for this particular election in terms of making sure that the BVAS perform optimally and also making sure that some of the challenges we had in the previous elections do not reoccur.”
He added that INEC had also given refresher training to all categories of staff that would be involved in the elections.
He said the country would be having 28 governorship elections and 993 state assembly constituency elections, saying “It’s a huge election and INEC will be paying very close attention to what is going on in the various states.