The Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) has assured the electorate that the application of sophisticated Information, Communication and Technological innovations would stem the tide of rigging during the June 18 governorship election in Ekiti state.

The Resident Electoral Commissioner in Ekiti State, Dr Adeniran Tella, said this in Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti on Wednesday, during a courtesy call on the office of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Ekiti State Council.

Tella, who said he was at the NUJ’s office to seek the union’s support for the coming poll, stated that gone were the days when figures were being concocted by politicians or electoral officers during elections, saying the ICT innovations, had given powers back to the voters.

Tella said technology advancement brought by Prof. Mahmood Yakubu-led INEC, had brought more sanity to the electoral process and erased the vestiges of electoral rigging.

On some giant strides taken to boost electoral participation in the forthcoming governorship poll, Tella added that the commission had created more polling points across taking the total to 2,445 from the initial 2,195 polling units.

Exposing INEC’s aversion to electoral violence, Tella said ” We have Election Violence Mitigating and Advocacy tools being used now to ascertain where violence could erupt during elections to prevent and curb violence so that we can protect the sanctity of the electoral system.

“On June 18, we are going to conduct an election here in Ekiti and it will be credible and transparent. We will give our people the opportunity to choose who will determine their lives. We are going to work with relevant agencies to bring whoever that is trying to foment trouble to book.

“The era has gone when people would just sit somewhere and cooked up figures and say this is what they have seen. It is impossible now. It is the people that will determine who becomes governor in Ekiti and nothing more,” he stated.

Preparatory to the election, Tella said INEC will conduct a claims and objections exercise on March 18 for all the candidates that would participate in the poll, so that the people can scrutinise all their claims by being put in the court of public opinion.

In his response, the NUJ Chairman, Ekiti Council, Rotimi Ojomoyela, said the union, had in the past joined hands with INEC to tackle quacks from covering the election and made a mess of the electioneering process.

“In the 2018 governorship election, we held a peace rally in collaboration with Civil Society Organisations, so that the election would be peaceful and we achieved success, because not even a single shot was fired anywhere during the election,” he said.

(Nigerian Tribune)

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