By Gift Olivia Samuel, The Sight News
ABUJA: Civil society organization, Connected Development (CODE), has disclosed that polling station issues has the highest publication on its election monitoring tool—Uzabe in the ongoing 2023 Presidential, Senate and House of Representatives election.
Addressing the press on Saturday, CODE’s Chief Executive, Hamzat Lawal,stated that the polling station issues range from Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) verification to inadequate voting materials, polling stations opening and many others.
He revealed that the Polling station issues which had the highest publication on Uzabe had the following breakdown by geopolitical zones: South East – 11%, South West – 13.19%, North Central – 19.15%, North East – 17.87%, North West – 23.4 and South South – 14.47, evidently showing that the north west had the highest polling station issues.
Giving a breakdown of the polling station issues by classification, he explained that polling station opening was 57%, BVAS issues 17%, incomplete officials 12%, wrong or inadequate voting materials 6%, vote buying 3%, Voters’ turnout 3%, voting suspended 2%, voters protesting 2%, voters not registered 1%, Partisan polling officials 1%, and priority voting 0%.
Meanwhile, Uzabe also highlighted positive events which had the second highest publishing with the following breakdown by geopolitical zones: South East – 3%, South West – 10%, North Central – 27%, North East – 13%, North West – 24%, South South – 23%. From the breakdown, north central had the highest positive events.
Highlights of the analysis that were published on the platform as at 12pm, 25th February, 2023 revealed the following: Collation center, which had about 2.3% published on the Uzabe platform; security, which had about 1.7% of the published report; ballot issues, which had about 0.56% of the published report; polling station issues, which had about 66.95% published report and positive events, which had about 28.49% of the published report.
While commending Nigerians for the mass voter turnout and smooth voting in most polling units, Lawal urged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to improve response time to troubled polling units.
For his part, the Organisation’s Director, Democracy and Governance, Emmanuel Njoku, called on all security agencies to be on alert to counter any form of violence that may erupt as results start trickling in.
