Constitution review: INEC seeks e-voting, announces date for 2023 polls

Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmud Yakubu yesterday asked for the replacement of the current manual voting with electronic system.

Yakubu said this at the inauguration of the House of Representatives Special Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution in Abuja.

"We have to address our electoral process which is manual. It is too expensive and cumbersome. The process of collating result is sometimes chaotic because the law says that you must write results manually and collate them manually right from the polling unit to the ward, from the ward to the local government, then the state and from the state to the national level in the case of the presidential election,” he said.

He also called for the establishment of electoral offences commission to punish electoral offenders.

“You cannot have a flourishing democracy in which laws are violated with impunity and nothing is done about that,” he said. The INEC chairman said that the next general elections would be held on February 23, 2023.

“Therefore, when is the 2023 general election going to hold? It will hold on the third Saturday of February of the election year which is February 18 2023. That means that from today (yesterday) till the 2023 general elections, we have exactly 855 days.” Yakubu said.

Guest Speaker at the inauguration, Prof. Dakas Dakas called on the committee to address the issues of referendum, restructuring and devolution of powers among others.

The professor of law called on the lawmakers to avoid pitfalls in their quest to review the 1999 constitution, stressing that their priorities should be that the peoples’ expectations were met.