INEC to deploy 3,450 card readers in Ondo The Independent National Electoral Commission in Ondo State has said it will deploy 3,450 smart card readers in the 3009 polling units in the state during next month’s presidential and Assembly elections. It also noted that a total of 858,040 Permanent Voter Cards had been distributed so far out of the 1,317,497 cards received, representing 65.13 per cent. Resident Electoral Commission in the state, Mr. Olusegun Agbaje, told journalists in Akure that a balance of 459,457 PVCs representing 34.87 per cent were awaiting collection by their owners. “To ensure that more registered voters get their PVCs before the elections, the distribution has been decentralized to the Registration Area level from 8.30am to 5.30pm from Monday to Saturday and 2.00pm to 5.00pm on Sunday’s,” he said. On the continuous voter registration, Agbaje said a total of 221,980 eligible Nigerians were registered in Ondo State and their PVCs would be taken to the respective Registration Areas where they registered for collection as soon as they were received from the headquarters. According to him, the commission would ensure that the cards from the new registration and those transferred were collected before the elections. On the smart card readers, the INEC Commissioner noted that the state INEC had received enough of the machines that would be used to authenticate vote cards on the day of the election. He said, “Only one smart card reader will be used at each voting point. We have more than enough with backup batteries that can last for ten hours.” He further said that no person would be able to use another’s voter card because the smart reader would display the photograph and other details of the owner of the card at the voting point. Agbaje said those buying or selling voter cards were wasting their time as fraudsters would be immediately detected at the point of authentication.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 20:59:22 +0000