by Mukhtar Alexander Dan’Iyan
INEC should go back to the drawing board vis-a-vis PVCs, Card Readers and the methodology for conducting the upcoming Presidential election.
Here’s why:
Firstly, APC has brought in hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of blank PVCs and are currently cloning them with legitimate voter information.
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Here is such a blank card as shown to me by a trusted source, and yes authorities have been notified.
Which brings us to the card readers:
The card readers authenticate the identity of the voters by cross matching fingerprints with those stored on the embedded chip.
The card reader then communicates with INEC via 1.2 GHZ GSM frequency.
With this in mind, APC has designed what they consider to be a fool proof rigging strategy based on two courses of action:
1) Present cloned voter cards at polling booths in strong APC areas, when the voter can’t be authenticated, all that has to happen is for the presiding officer to fill out an incident report. Once this is done, the PVC holder is automatically accredited to vote.
Remember the NYSC members killed by Buhari’s supporters in 2011? They ‘offense’ was a refusal to accredit underage voters, do Nigerians think that in 2015, presiding officers would be willing to risk their lives just to ensure foreign nationals or underage voters with cloned PVCs aren’t accredited? Highly unlikely.
2) In polling booths where there is a weak APC presence, GSM jammers shall be deployed, thus preventing card readers from communicating with the INEC base station.
The card reader is thus rendered redundant to all intents and purposes, and since a jammer will still jam all subsequently deployed units in that area, polls have to be rescheduled till the next day. http://goo.gl/a13u13
Unfortunately, the likelihood of all voters turning up again is next to nothing, especially if results released the previous day indicate their votes won’t make any difference.
The advantage of these two strategies to APC is that they are able to increase the votes cast in their favor, while simultaneously cutting down the number of votes that can be obtained by PDP.
This gives APC an unfair and unjust advantage in the popular vote, even if they don’t get the pre-requisite 25% of 36 States required to win the election.
Consequently, the only way to avoid this mess and not plunge Nigeria into an abyss of chaos, INEC must cancel the use of PVCs being authenticated with Card Readers, and instead resort to TVCs and/or PVCs preferably in conjunction with Option A4.
Thank you for reading, God Bless You and God Bless Nigeria.
Mukhtar Alexander Dan’Iyan is a Public Policy and Security Expert and also the Editor-In-Chief of 15 Past 8 Media Group in Nigeria. This article was first published at AD76.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MrAyeDee.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
