Mixed response to card readers in Nigeria's elections

Mixed response to card readers in Nigeria's elections
By Paul Adepoju
30 Mar 2015

Several complaints were recorded at polling units across Nigeria as a result of the deployment of permanent voter card scanners by Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the accreditation of eligible voters that participated in the nation's presidential elections.

Nigeria's president Goodluck Jonathan, who is also the candidate of the People's Democratic Party (PDP), was not easily accredited using the card readers - regulators had to switch to the manual system when none of the four card readers could match his fingerprint to the one in INEC's database.

However, voters who spoke to ITWebAfrica in south western part of the country lauded the electoral body for deploying the card readers as a way of tackling electoral fraud in the country and having the manual system in place to deal with any challenges.

"Even though the card reader didn't positively match my thumbprint, the officials still used the manual method although the card reader verified my card was authentic. They just checked for my name on the list and when they saw it, they accredited me," Dapo Aremu, a voter in Ibadan said.

Commenting on the performance of card readers, the chairman of INEC, Prof. Attahiru Jega said out of the 150,000 card readers deployed, only about 450 were affected by the errors.

He said: "But because we just wanted to ensure that Nigerians who have been patient in this process have an opportunity to exercise their rights and because the numbers are relatively insignificant, that's why we thought it was necessary to do an addendum to the guidelines and allow those people to be able to vote once they can be physically authenticated and verified.

"Thank God it went well. The only challenge is that it meant the voting has gone on in some places into late evening and early night."

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