At last, the 2023 Nigerian elections are here. Tomorrow (Friday) the electorate will file out to vote in national elections involving the presidency and all seats in the National Assembly (NASS), comprising the Senate and House of Representatives. And, on March 11, it will be time for state elections involving 28 state governorships and house of assembly seats in the 36 states of the federation. Eight governorships are off the general election cycle.

By all accounts, the 2023 polls constitute a huge project. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says it has a record of 93,469,008 eligible voters for the elections where a total of 15,309 candidates are seeking 1,491 offices on offer across the country. There are 18 candidates seeking the presidency, 1,101 contenders for the 109 Senate seats and 3,122 candidates for the 360 House of Representatives seats. The state elections on will feature 837 candidates seeking the 28 governorship offices on offer, and 10,231 candidates running for a total of 993 state assembly seats nationwide. The elections will hold in 176,846 polling units across the country and will involve nearly 1.4million election officials, out of which more than 200,000 are members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). Earlier on this week, INEC said it had registered 1.5million agents of the 18 political parties participating in the polls. There will be more than 500,000 security operatives manning the elections, out of which the Police are deploying some 311,000 personnel.

The 2023 elections will be the seventh consecutive poll to be held in 24 years of uninterrupted democracy in Nigeria. A defining feature of this election is the safe net of legal framework available for use of technology by the electoral umpire. INEC will be using the Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), a handheld device that will verify and authenticate voters who show up for the election, using either fingerprint or facial capture. The BVAS will also be used to scan and electronically transmit election results in real time from polling units to the INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal that the electoral body has assured would be accessible to any interested member of the public. The IReV portal will enable the public to view polling unit election result sheets as they are uploaded on election-day.

By the electoral body’s rules, polling units will open from 8:30a.m and will so remain till 2:30p.m for voters to join the queue. That is to say any voter who is on queue by 2:30p.m will be eligible to vote, no matter the time of the day and how long the queue may be. The balloting system is the open-secret ballot. Voters will be required to present their Permanent Voter Card (PVC) to polling unit officials to get accredited with BVAS for the election, after which they will be handed the ballot paper to proceed to the voting cubicle and thumbprint their choice, and thereafter return to drop their folded ballot paper in the transparent ballot box placed in open view of all. It is at the conclusion of voting that the presiding official will sort the ballot papers, announce the scores by respective political party, complete the necessary INEC form that will then be scanned and uploaded to the IReV portal.

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