Nigeria is following the trend of several less endowed African countries in adopting biometrics in the voters register. Though it is the beginning of a fair election, the beginning has in many cases on the continent been fraught with embarrassments. Whether Nigeria’s electoral management body would learn from the mishaps of last Saturday is a matter of concern.
By Emmanuel Aziken, Political Editor
National Commissioners of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC were ecstatic on Monday at the end of a meeting to review the trial run of the card reader proposed to be used for authenticating voters during the forthcoming national elections.
“INEC is satisfied that the use of SCRs in the 2015 general elections will add tremendous transparency and credibility to the accreditation process on Election Day,” a statement issued by Mr. Kayode Idowu, chief press secretary to the national chairman of the commission, Prof. Attahiru Jega said last Wednesday.
On that basis, the Commission reassured “the public that it will do everything necessary to ensure that the processes of the elections are seamless, free, fair, credible and peaceful.”
The enthusiasm of the commissioners was upon their claim that the mock trial fully satisfied their objectives, even though there was a classical failure of the machine in Ebonyi State.
Even more worrisome for many observers was the about 41 per cent failure rate of the Smart Card Readers in cross matching the fingerprints of card holders to their cards.
Even while trying to sort out the reason for that, the commission officials it seemed, appeared to be satisfied that other basic objectives of the card reader had been met, throwing out arguments to abandon its use.
FILE PHOTO: PVC test-run: INEC officials attending to a registered voter in the Port Harcourt Local Government Area Ward One, unit 23, during the card readers test-run in Rivers State. Photo: Nwankpa Chijioke.
INEC nevertheless, resolved to redo the exercise in Ebonyi given what was claimed as the exceptionally high rate of failure in that state. However, in every other state the Commission was satisfied that the basic duty of the card reader, to wit, to authenticate the genuineness of the Permanent Voter Card, PVC was in almost all cases satisfactorily achieved.
Potential voter
PVCs from outside the trial areas were rejected. There was also the report of the device arresting a cloned PVC that was brought by a potential voter in Port-Harcourt.
The development it seemed had thrown the voter cards buying industry in the country out of business. Political thugs and moguls who in the past had pilled up voter cards to sell to politicians have with the introduction of the card reader and the PVC gone out of that line of business.
The endorsement of the device was a development the ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP was apparently not happy with given the vociferous clamour against the use of the device by its governors at their parley with civil society and the media that same Wednesday. While disavowing cheating, they claimed that that INEC had sufficiently convinced them that it had mastered the art.
The adoption of the card reader was one of the initiatives of the Commission under Jega to arrest the inflation of the voter roll in the country. Before now politicians had adopted the practise of piling up the voter register with fictitious names and obtaining voter cards that were employed on Election Day to achieve their aims.
At the end of the voter registration exercise in 2011, the Commission had claimed that a total of 73 million Nigerians had registered out of which the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, AFIS had removed 800,000 persons for double registration.
The removal of the double registrants was the first time in the history of the country that double registrants were being removed from the voters’ roll. And that was because of the employment of the biometric system in the registration of voters.
Idowu, had in an article on the issue alluded to the fact that the use of AFIS was the reason behind the failure of many prominent politicians to find their names on the voter roll during recent elections and notably in Anambra State.
Biometric register
According to him: “Some of the persons who accused INEC of disenfranchising them because they could not find their names in the biometric register during the Anambra election were really multiple registrants who on Election Day happened to have gone to polling units where the extras had been eliminated.
“For avoidance of doubt, a multiple registrant who on Election Day goes to the polling unit where the extra data had been eliminated will not find his/her name on the biometric register and will not be able to vote. Such a person cannot legitimately accuse INEC of having disenfranchised him/her.”
The use of the electronic register was itself a challenge given the thin line between the employment of biometrics with its electronic infrastructure and the strict prohibition by the Electoral Act against electronic voting.
Section 52 of the Electoral Act, which prohibits the use of electronic voting machines, spells thus:
- -(1) (a) Voting at an election under this Bill shall be by open secret ballot.
(b) The use of electronic voting machine for the time being is prohibited.
Given this prohibition it is not surprising that some activists especially within the ruling party had sought to contest that using an electronic register as is being done by INEC was against the law.
The commission it was learnt has sufficiently satisfied itself with the legal cover on the use of the electronic register and hence the doggedness that has attended its decision to stick with it and the card reader.
Besides, the Commission claims to be adhering to global best practises given the claim that even several less endowed African countries have also taken up the use of the card reader and other biometric infrastructure in the voting process.
Among the countries to have adopted biometrics are Ghana, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda and Senegal that have adopted the use of biometrics in the registration of voters.
•Card reader
That adoption is upon the claim that the beginning of vote rigging is the rigging of voters registers a point that has been well noted by Christiana Thorpe, the head of the Sierra Leone Election Management.
“Credible elections start with credible voter registration,” she was quoted as saying in a lecture to the African Research Institute in London in 2011.
As was the case during the trial run in 12 states in Nigeria last weekend, the adoption of the biometrics was in several of the African countries that used it not exactly seamless at the start. In some cases as in Kenya and Ghana, it led to delays as queues stretched out beyond imagination.
Hitech election in Africa
Kenya’s general elections held in 2013 with presidential, federal and provincial legislative and governorship elections all held in one day had been expected to be the most hi-tech election in Africa.
The election management body which had been financed by the Canadian government to retool an electronic register had boasted that besides the use of the biometrics to identify voters that results would be transmitted by special telephones from every polling unit direct to the collation centre in Nairobi.
However, on Election Day the system crashed to the irritation of many stakeholders as the biometric machines failed to read the fingerprints of many voters accurately forcing a resort to manual entry. The case in Kenya was worsened by the lack of power back up in the schools used as voting points given that many of the schools were without power supply.
Apparently learning from that experience, Prof. Jega has sought to protect Nigeria from such a possible disgrace.
The card readers according to INEC sources can last up to 12 hours in continuous use a fact that was attested to last weekend given that there were no reports of card readers packing up. Besides, the card readers are equipped with backup batteries.
Also important in the consideration of the Commission is the fact that the card readers can relay data on voters to a central server enabling analysis of the votes from each polling point.
It is a technology that is bound to deepen the country’s democratic system allowing politicians to get reliable data on voting patterns and indeed confirm the authenticity of votes cast at any voting point.
Having taken Nigerians to this point, the ball is now in Jega’s court.
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