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Thu, Mar

2023: INEC To Deploy Undercover Agents To Polling Units

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In an effort to prevent vote buying and other electoral malpractices during the 2023 General Elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said it would deploy undercover agents to polling units across the country. This was disclosed by INEC’s Chairman of Information and Voters Education Committee, Festus Okoye during a citizen’s elections dialogue hosted by YIAGA Africa in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Channels TV, with the theme “What makes a good election in Nigeria”.


He said the Commission would deploy undercover security personnel and other measures to ensure a free and fair election.

According to him, “This Commission is focused and determined to give Nigerians a good election. In terms of the issue of vote buying, the Commission has reconfigured the various polling units to guarantee the secrecy of votes.

“In terms of training of ad-hoc staff, we’ve given them very good training and we’ll continue to train them on how to configure and position the voting cubicle to guarantee the secrecy of votes.

“We have also made sure that people do not enter the voting compartments with their mobile phones that can take pictures and we’re also collaborating with the different security agencies under the auspices of the Inter-agency Consultative Committee on Election Security to make sure that plain clothe security personnel are deployed to some polling units on election day to stem the issue of vote buying and vote selling.

“As far as the Commission is concerned, our mandate is to organize, undertake and supervise elections and that’s exactly what we’re going to do and that’s what we’re going to continue to do”.

He also revealed that INEC made a deliberate effort to involve technology in the electoral process to reduce the problems associated with human interference.

Okoye said, “We deliberately decided to include technology in the electoral process in order to alleviate pernicious human interference in that process. We’re going to make sure technology is deployed and we’re also going to make sure that we transmit the polling unit results into our INEC viewing portal”.

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