INEC rises up physically challenged needs

INEC rises up physically challenged needs
Godwin Ukah, Abuja

Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has promise to make special provision to cater for the physically challenged in the society to enable them participate effectively in the April general election.

The Chairman of the Commission, Professor Attahiru Jega stated this at a one-day National Workshop on Voters’ and Civic Rights for persons living with disability.

Accordingly, he said that the political parties have a major role to play in integrating marginalized groups including persons with disabilities into the political process.

The workshop brought together the physically challenged persons, Civil Society Groups, government officials, media and the academia to discuss the challenges and the way forward for the April general election.

Electronic Register Option

The INEC Chairman has equally confirmed that the commission would use electronically-generated voter register for accreditation at the April elections.

Speaking with leaders of political parties, Professor Jega said that since the law did not permit electronic voting system, the commission would not use the Direct Data Capture (DDC) machine for accreditation purposes.

“Our laws say that there will be no electronic voting and we are worried that if we introduce electronic accreditation, somebody will go to court and challenge it and say it is electronic voting being introduced in another guise.

“What we are going to use for April election is electronically generated register from the database that we have compiled through the registration system that we did electronically,’’  he said.

Jega said that there were already sufficient bases of verifying whoever presented an identification card for the purpose of elections.

 Back Up

He insisted that manual register would not be used for accreditation. However, the manual register which was compiled at the same time that data were captured with the DDC machines would serve as back-up in case there was any problem with the machines.

Jega described the manual register as lacking photographs and was not meant to be used for accreditation.

He said that the commission would not also want to use the DDC machines for accreditation due to the challenges of deploying the machines.

Jega, however, said the electronically generated-register would be of high quality photographs for easy identification of images.

Qasim /NAN