Palmer Ogheneyole Nathaniel
The National Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, has stated that the commission will deploy a newly introduced technology known as INEC Voter Enrolment Device (IVED), which he explained was capable of eradicating instances of voting by identity theft using another person’s Permanent Voter cards (PVC) on the day of election.
Yakubu who stated this on Tuesday in Abuja during a chat with media practitioners, said IVED is the commission’s new voter enrolment and verification device designed to strengthen the credibility of voter accreditation and result management process during elections in the country.
According to the electoral umpire, the machine-readable Permanent Voter Card (PVC) and the Smart Card Reader (SCR), were all introduced to enhance the uploading and transmission of polling unit, results in real-time on Election Day. He said, however, for some time, many stakeholders had called on the INEC to strengthen the voter accreditation process during elections.
He said this was especially with reference to the use of incident form where the SCR failed to authenticate the fingerprints of voters.
“Such concern is legitimate given the fact that the SCR successfully verifies any card that belongs to the polling unit for which it is configured irrespective of who presents it.
“Their apprehension, therefore, is that by using the incident form to cover those whose fingerprints are not authenticated by the SCR, a voter may be able to use another person’s PVC to vote during an election.”
Yakubu said that to address the concern, INEC attempted to introduce the facial biometric authentication during accreditation using the Z-Pad tablet to complement the fingerprint process through the Card Reader. He said that this was done before the Edo Governorship election in September 2020.
“However, the Commission was not satisfied with the pilot held in the Nasarawa Central State Constituency by-election a month earlier in August 2020.
“We, therefore, suspended the idea to enable us to do some innovations; so the Z-pad was therefore only used to upload Polling Unit results to the IReV portal during elections.”
Yakubu said that the commission intended to carry out a pilot exercise using the new device in Delta during the Isoko South 1 State Assembly constituency by-election holding on Saturday Sept. 11
“The BVAS will now perform the functions of both the SCR and Z-Pad in the by-election.
“Thereafter, it will be deployed in the Anambra Governorship election in November,” Yakubu added.
