Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Attahiru Jega, said on Sunday that the commission was not under pressure to declare the results of Saturday’s presidential and National Assembly elections inconclusive.
He also assured that collation and release of the results of the elections will begin by noon today.
According to the INEC chairman, results from two states were received last night, although reports indicated that the collation had reached 80 per cent and 90 per cent in some states.
Jega, at a press briefing in Abuja on the elections, said contrary to insinuations, the Smart Card Readers worked in most of the 150,000 polling units.
He said the failure of Card Readers was recorded in 374 of the 150,000 in the country, which was less than 1%.
Jega said: “We are not under any pressure to declare elections inconclusive. I wonder who will be interested in declaring inconclusive election. I want to believe that candidates would have wanted to be declared winners and not to have an election being declared inconclusive. Really, there is no truth whatsoever to that”.
He continued: “I have said that in 2011, INEC was able to declare the presidential election results within 48 hours and we have been working assiduously to be able to beat that record and so our hope and what we have been working for is to be able to declare the results within 48hours and, hopefully, in a much less time as we did in. 2011.
“So, the 48 hours commenced after the elections had ended yesterday (Saturday) when substantial majority of the polling units have concluded elections.
“According to reports from our state offices, the collation of results has commenced and is going on well.
“The first collated results for the presidential election are expected at the National Collation Centre here in Abuja by this evening (Sunday’s).
“Meanwhile, the commission warns strongly against premature publication and announcement of results by unauthorized persons and media channels particularly online sites.
“Only INEC is empowered by law to announce results and it is an offence for anyone to preempt the commission in this regard”.
He said INEC was investigating the failure of Card Readers in 374 Polling Units out if 150,000.
He said: “Obviously, we received reports from the field that the Card Readers were not reading and the numbers reported were alarming.
“From the statistics, however, 0.25 per cent of the total number of Card Readers were reported to have failed. We had deployed over 150,000.
“The percentage is statistically insignificant. Maybe only 374 Card Readers (less than 500) did not work. It was a tremendous achievement. We believe the use of Card Readers was the right decision under the circumstance.
“It is also gratifying to note that the Card Readers worked well in the majority of Polling Units, even though there were areas where difficulties experienced necessitated additional guidelines by the commission to allow for manual accreditation of voters, as announced yesterday.
“So far, Osun, Kebbi, Ekiti, Adamawa, Borno, Jigawa, Anambra, Akwa Ibom and Ebonyi states have reported reverting to manual-only accreditation of voters in some polling units.
“Investigations into what accounted for the difficulties encountered with the Card Readers are ongoing”.
Regarding the crisis in Rivers State, especially the abuse of the process, Jega promised that the commission will probe the alleged irregularities.
He said: “This morning, I received a letter from the APC political party calling for cancellation and postponing of the Rivers state elections.
“When we received this kind of letter of complaint, we do our best to thoroughly investigate them and we have commenced our investigations.
“The commission has not yet taken a decision, but we will take the decision and we will communicate our dec...
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