A post-election analysis of the 2015 national elections posted on the website of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has shown that 5.8 million people were able to vote despite not being accredited by the card reader.
The card reader was introduced in the 2015 national elections and was supposed to be the basis for accreditation of all voters in the election.
The aim of the electronic card reader was to add credibility to the elections by ensuring that only those who are duly registered on the INEC database are able to vote in the elections.
But the information from INEC website shows that only 23.6 million voters were accredited with the smart card reader in the 2019 elections.
This number represents 81 percent of the total valid votes of 29.4 million cast in the presidential and national assembly elections. The balance of 5.8 million valid votes cast in the 2019 presidential and national elections were not accredited by the card reader.
Buhari won the presidential elections with total votes of 15.4 million while former president Goodluck Jonathan came second with 12.85 million votes, a difference of 2.57 million votes.
INEC had announced during the declaration of the presidential election result on April 1, 2015, that the total accredited votes were 31.75 million while total valid votes stood at 28.6 million, the number of rejected votes was 844,519.
A further analysis of the smart card reader performance in the 2015 election shows that only 10.23 million voters had full biometric accreditation. This represented just 43 percent of the total valid votes cast. Full biometric accreditation is where a voter’s details on his card reader are matched with the voter’s details on the smart card reader. This means that the card reader was able to authenticate the fingerprint of the card holder and therefore there is no doubt that he or she is the valid owner of the card.
As a percentage of total valid votes cast, Lagos state had the highest proportion of voters that had full biometric accreditation with 70 percent of all voters having full biometric accreditation.
It was followed by Osun State where 60 percent of voters had full biometric accreditation. Rivers State had the least, with just nine percent of voters getting full biometric accreditation Bayelsa, Anambra, Imo and Kano had less than 15 percent of voters getting full biometric accreditation.
The INEC data also shows that another 13.4 million voters had ‘card-only authentication’. This means that the voters card was recognised by the card reader but the voters finger print details was not captured or did not match with the details on the card reader. However, the voter was still allowed to vote at the discretion of the electoral officer at the polling station.
Former president Jonathan and his wife fall into this category as on the election day in 2015, the president was one of those whose finger prints was not captured by the smart card reader.
He had to go back home and come back to get accredited to vote. The balance of 5.8 million votes were those who had to be accredited manually, according to sources at INEC apparently due to the failure of the card readers.
Zamfara had the highest ‘card only accreditation’ with 74 percent of all valid votes in the state. Katsina followed closely with 70 percent of voters having card only accreditation. Bauchi, Kano, Jigawa, Kebbi, Kwara, Nassarawa all had above 60 percent of ‘card only accreditation’ of total votes cast.
Reacting to this discrepancy, INEC Director of Voter Education and Publicity, Oluwole Osaze Uzzi, in a chat with BusinessDay on Wednesday explained that INEC has taken adequate steps to correct whatever lapses witnessed in 2015 election even as he assured that in 2019, accreditation will be simultaneous with voting to forestall a situation where people will be accredited but will not return to vote.
“You know that in 2015 the system was you do accreditation, you go, come back and vote. But some people did not come back to vote though I don’t have the figures. But for 2019 it is going be simultaneous accreditation and voting,” he noted.
On the issue of the Smart Card Reader, which recorded instances of failure in some polling units during the 2015 elections, Uzzi admitted the shortcoming but assured that the card readers are being enhanced and improved upon.
He noted that additional software has been installed in the card readers, stressing that the scanners are now wider than they used to be. He added that the card readers used in the 2015 election will still be used in 2019.
He promised that Nigerians will see a greater improvement of the election processes in 2019.
But a senior member of INEC, who provided more information to BusinessDay on the issue on condition of anonymity, said INEC had to resort to manual accreditation when it observed that the card readers failed to work in some places and in the process ensured that Nigerians were not disenfranchised.
“During the presidential election, which was the first election that took place in 2015, which was the major election in which we used the card reader, we had issues with the card reader during the election. The issue we had was that the card readers were prepared weeks before the election so they were deployed to Local Government offices and kept in preparation for the election. Now in trying to preserve the lifespan of the battery, the officials at the local government area offices decided to remove the batteries thinking that will preserve them.”
“Unknown to them the removal of the battery was going to reset the card readers and on election day, they just deployed the card reader to the field and put the batteries. But ‘lo and behold’ the date set was back to default, which was the date of manufacture. The card is configured in a way that once you start to use it outside the time of accreditation which is already programmed it between 8 am and 8 pm of the election day, it will not work. So that was the challenge we had that morning of the election day and people raised issues. Unfortunately, we did not have enough technical support staff, by that time we only had one technical support staff per Local Government in the 774 local government areas in the country.”
“So unfortunately before the technical support guys could get to the polling units, some of them had resorted to the use of manual accreditation. I remember that the then INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, went on air and announced that because of the challenge we had with the card reader, we are resorting to manual accreditation, so this was what happened. In fact, we are even surprised that we had up to 23 million accredited with the card reader. But by the time we went for the governorship election, which was two weeks after, we did not have that challenge anymore. So that is what we can say accounts for the difference in the number accredited with the card reader and the number that you have quoted,” the source said.
Our INEC source also explained the difference between card only accreditation, which was 13 million and full-biometric card accreditation, which was 10 million.
“We have two processes with the card reader. The first thing the card reader does is that it reads your card and the second thing is to verify that it was you and the finger prints brought on election day are the fingerprints template still on the card. So if it reads your card and it does not successfully authenticate you, we call that card only authentication but if it does read you and also authenticate you during the process then we call that full biometric authentication.”
“But we had people who it read their card but it did not successfully authenticate them, so we called that failed authentication and we had that as 13 million. So that added it up to 23 million. But you know then that we came up with the use of incidence form. So if the card reader reads your card and fails to authenticate you, then your information is filled on the incidence form which we now use to perform the accreditation process for the person manually but that information must be installed on the card reader.”
“Remember that the names of the about 5.8 million who voted manually are on the Voters Register, and once your name is on the register, the law says you will be allowed to vote. We resorted to manual accreditation because it would have been a bad idea if people were not allowed to vote. The card reader was to help us authenticate the voters. The challenge before now was that anybody can just pick up a card and go and vote and claimed to be somebody else.”
“We know the polling units where it happened. We just felt it will not be necessary to let Nigerians know that,” the source said.
Meanwhile, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has declined comment on the discrepancy as the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, neither replied text messages sent to him nor answered questions sent to him via social media platform even after copies of the INEC data was made available to him by BusinessDay correspondent.
Although the National Publicity Secretary of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Kola Ologbondiyan, did not pick his calls and did not respond to text messages sent to him on the vexed issue, the main opposition party had earlier expressed doubt over the ability of the electoral body to conduct free and fair elections in 2019.
Even though the 2015 general election was not conducted by INEC under Mahmood Yakubu, the PDP had in a recent statement, questioned the outing of the electoral umpire in recent times.
The PDP also called for a review of the voters register in Kano and Katsina States to address alleged instances of the registration of underage voters in the local government polls in the two Northwest States.
“Nigerians have completely lost confidence in INEC under Professor Mahmood Yakubu and we urge him to take the path of honour and do the needful before it becomes too late.”
“As you are aware, INEC has been indicted for registering and issuing permanent voters card (PVCs) to millions of underage persons, particularly in Kano and Katsina States respectively,” he had stated.
While dismissing the reason advanced by INEC to justify the registration of minors in the two states, the party said Yakubu’s reign at the commission is no longer tenable.
“The credibility of our electoral process under the current INEC is hugely in doubt. The nation was terrified by the commission’s Director of Publicity and Voter Education, Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, who announced that INEC registered minors because its agents were threatened by members of the communities in those States.”
