Nigeria 2015 Polls: INEC card readers pass mock exam

The field testing of card readers which was held on Saturday was largely successful but not without some hitches.

These irregularities in the exercise that was meant to be a dress rehearsal according to findings by our correspondents ranged from the inability of the card reader to identify some finger and thumb prints and slow pace of the process.

However, occurrences of success permeated most of the poll units visited by Punch. The major grouse of electorate in Niger State was the time spent on the accreditation of each voter. This, many of the participants in the mock polls described as “too slow”.

This drew the attention of both the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Progressive Congress in the state on Saturday which commended the Independent National Electoral Commission.

The state PDP Chairman, Umar Musa Maali, said “the time spent to accredit one voter is much. If it can take a minute per voter to be accredited, and with a polling unit like this place that has over 1,000 voters, it is going to take over 1,000 minutes, which is about 16 hours, to accredit all the voters. The 16 hours is more than the accredited time of five hours. I do not know how INEC is going to sort it out.”

The APC Publicity Officer in the State, Jonathan Vatsa, while speaking on his party’s concerns over the Internet connection, described the service as poor but that the party would ensure INEC’s attention is drawn to it so that all polling units are covered and captured during the elections.

...Punch