PDP tasks INEC on e-voting as Osoba backs move, regrets ‘bastardised’ electoral process

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to immediately begin a process of legalising electronic voting in the country to check abuse of the electoral system. It’s National Chairman, Uche Secondus, made the call yesterday while receiving a party verification team of the INEC in Abuja.

According to him, it would be difficult for opposition parties to participate in future elections if “what transpired in Kogi and Bayelsa governorship elections is not addressed.”Secondus, who decried election violence in Nigeria, lamented that military’s participation in polls.

Recalling that the PDP warehoused democracy for the nation from 1999 until 2015 when it lost the presidential poll, the party chair claimed: “The 2019 elections set Nigeria backward.He regretted that INEC and the ruling party had been “unable to replicate the democratic foundation laid by the PDP.”

Calling for electoral reforms, Secondus submitted: “I am not going to bore you with issues that are well known to your commission in your review of elections but I would like to urge your commission to move quickly and initiate Electoral Act amendment that will legalise electronic voting and remove the influence of the military as primary security on Election Day.”

The chairman claimed: “The ruling APC unlike the PDP is not disposed to any electoral law that will prevent them from manipulating the system. We in the PDP expect INEC to be at the forefront of the process to have a legal framework for the conduct of free, fair and credible elections” In a related development, former Governor Olusegun Osoba of Ogun State yesterday called on the National Assembly to include electronic voting in its Electoral Act amendment.

Speaking at an event, organised by the League of Veteran Journalists to mark the160 years of journalism in Nigeria in Abeokuta, he insisted that the nation had no excuse not to digitalise its voting process.The veteran journalist, who spoke on the theme, “Re-inventing the practice of journalism in Nigeria with emphasis on the influence of the social media”, regretted that the electoral process in Nigeria had been “bastardised.”

The state governor, Dapo Abiodun who also spoke at the ceremony, stated that as “much as the social media has made positive contributions to the dissemination of information, it had unfortunately become an easy tool in the hands of some unscrupulous elements for malicious an deliberate misinformation.”