2015: We Won’t Give Room For Ballot Snatching – Jega

Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega, yesterday declared that the electoral powerhouse was ready to conduct a free, fair and more credible election in 2015.

He also said that the INEC will provide a level playing ground for all political parties and their candidates.
 
Prof. Jega, who stated this at the closing ceremony of a 3-day retreat for the Commission’s Directors, told staff and Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) in Kaduna that the era of ballot box snatching is over as new measures will be adopted to forestall the ugly trend.


The INEC chairman explained that the digitalised electoral procedure has made it impossible ballot boxes from to be carried from one polling station to another, adding that henceforth, every polling booth will have a specialised digital number and all voting cards for that particular station will carry the digital number.

“When you register in polling booth A, your registration number is one; everybody that registered there will bear number one, which means that the polling unit is A1. If your polling unit is B, you have B1/1-500. If your voting card is registered under B unit and it finds its way into A unit, that vote automatically becomes invalid.

“It pays for people contesting in the election to ensure that they play by the rules of the game, because when you snatch boxes from one polling unit to another, you stand the chance of losing your votes as they will all be declared invalid.

“With this new system and other initiatives put in place by the Commission, 2015 will witness a hitch-free election, even though, I cannot assure you of a perfect election as we are learning day by day,” Jega stressed.

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