Digital ballot boxes for 2015 elections - INEC

Snatching of ballot boxes would be impossible in the Nigeria's 2015 general elections. This was made known by the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Attahiru Jega, on Thursday at the closing ceremony of a four-day retreat for INEC’s commissioners in Kaduna.

The INEC boss further adviced politicians not to engage in electoral malpractice in the forthcoming polls.


Prof. Jega also said that “the new system of digitalised electoral procedure has made it impossible for carrying ballot box from one polling station to another, because 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 carry number one, which means that 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 box, that vote automatically becomes invalid.

“It pays for people contesting election to ensure that they play by the rules of the game, because when you snatch ballot box from one polling unit to another, you stand the chance of losing the votes count 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 absolute perfection as we are learning day by day.”

The INEC Chairman said that the aim of organising the retreat was address previous mistakes made by the commission.

“We came together to brainstorm on problems encountered by the commission in previous elections and after three days of deliberation, we concluded that some of the major problems facing INEC include the delay in the supply of voting materials to polling units, competent personnel and security coverage for the staff.”

Jega also called on all stakeholders to join hands together in order to ensure a hitch-free exercise noting that the commission cannot solve the electoral problems alone.

“We in the commission cannot solve those problems alone, we need the collaboration of other agencies like the security and the Presidency to ensure that funds are made available at the right time for the right purpose.”