The Independent National Electoral Commission has proposed to buy about 200,000 electronic voting machines to cater for the 176,846 Polling Units in the country in preparation for the 2023 general elections.
The agency’s Electronic Voting Implementation Committee has been reconstituted and has commenced work.
INEC National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, told journalists that a team of INEC’s in-house engineers were currently evaluating proposals submitted by 49 companies, both local and foreign, for the supply of the machines.
The commission said its engineering team would consider factors such as the machines’ ruggedness and design before short-listing any of the companies.
Okoye said there were about 176,846 Polling Units in the country, and each polling unit must be serviced by at least one electronic voting machine adding that the commission must also acquire redundancies or backups.
The commission stated that companies that came for the RFI demonstration were from Nigeria, the Netherlands, China, the United States, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and India.
speaking on the reason for the delay in short-listing the successful companies, the INEC commissioner cited factors such as the COVID-19 fiasco, expansion of voter access to Polling Units, and the constitutive legal instrument backing up the deployment of e-voting machines in the electoral process.
Okoye said the resumption of the Continuous Voter Registration exercise had taken a lot of the commission’s attention, adding that an Electronic Voting Implementation Committee had been reconstituted and had commenced work.
