The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that it would use the 2023 General Elections to set the standard for future polls in Nigeria. Its Chairman, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, was reported to have given the assurance during a meeting with Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) at the INEC Headquarters in Abuja, last Monday.
It would be recalled that the INEC boss had, in an earlier interview with journalists on the sideline of the 2021 budget defence at the House of Representatives, late last year, announced that his Commission intends to introduce an electronic voting method in the country; possibly beginning with the Anambra governorship election this year.
From the foregoing, it is clear that INEC is positioning to deepen the present secret ballot arrangement in Nigeria even as there are almost daily indications that this voting system is beginning to suffer hiccups in the very industrial democracies from which we copied it.
For instance, the 2016 presidential election in the United States was widely suspected to have been electronically altered by offshore manipulators (principally from Russia) to favour the erstwhile Republican president, Donald Trump. Again, in 2020, it was the latter who reportedly trumped up charges of voting irregularities by members of the Democratic Party to oust him from the White House.
After many elections since its introduction in Nigeria, INEC is yet to come to terms with the smartcard readers’ hit-and-miss functionality for which reason the so-called voter’s Incidence Form has become a permanent appendage to our balloting process. And now, they want to push it a notch higher by introducing the electronic voting machine.
Some reliable sources have it that the 2015 and 2019 General Elections may have cost the government an average of N250 billion. If we add what the political parties spent in preparing for those elections, the figure may well rise to over double this amount. This is even exclusive of the cost of re-runs and post-election litigations (to defend the victorious president and state governors).
But why are Nigerians so bent on the continuous exploration of this costly and stressful electoral path? Shoes, they say, have their sizes; it is left for the buyer to identify and purchase his size. As far as republican systems go, Nigeria can be likened to a 10-year old who opts to choose size-42 shoes because that’s exactly what most of his adult friends wear. In other words, the world’s poverty capital is not yet ripe for the kind of electoral system she is spending so much money attempting to practise.
Available literature show that Australia practised the open ballot electoral system until 1856, Britain 1872, Switzerland 1872, Canada 1874 and Belgium 1877. If we juxtapose this with when these nations were formed, then we can begin to understand how long it took them to build and develop the technology and political culture that enabled a transition to the electronic secret ballot system they enjoy today.
In Nigeria, it is said that the open ballot system was in practise until 1923 when the British colonialists first introduced the secret voting method. The former system was mainly adopted by town unions to elect their officers.
But even as the system was not new to Nigeria, it took the radical introduction of Option A4 in the 1993 General Elections by the Chairman of the then National Electoral Commission of Nigeria (NECON), Prof. Humphrey Nwosu, for many voters in the country to appreciate the nature of the open voting process.
The presidential election of that year which was widely presumed to have been won by Chief MoshoodAbiola of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) against Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC) is still regarded as the freest, fairest, safest and most transparent in the country, so far. But even so, it was later annulled by the then military junta led by General Ibrahim Babangida.
In a nutshell, Option A4 simply required registered voters to present themselves at their polling units within the specified time on Election Day for accreditation, after which the voter could choose to go back home or hang around until the appointed voting time. Once it was time, an announcement was made by an authorised election official for accredited voters to form a queue in front of the posters bearing symbols of their choice political parties. This would go on for a while until it was time for voters’ counting when security agents took up positions behind the last voter on each line.
Counting of voters was usually shouted aloud and keenly watched by other election officials, security men, party agents and even the queuing voters themselves. If well conducted, the entire exercise could be over in less than four hours (usually between 8:00 am and 12:00 noon).
Other advantages of this voting option are that it eliminates the use of ballot papers; eliminates double voting; eliminates voided votes due to irregular thumb printing; produces instant and credible results; eliminates ballot snatching; discourages double standards; reduces incidence of waiting for late arrival of officials and voting materials as the RAC centres will have little to distribute. Its transparency and credibility also attract less litigation and the attendant costs, thereby releasing judicial officers to attend to other equally important court cases.
On the other hand, its critics are always quick to fault it as outdated and capable of resulting to intimidation by unforgiving politicians whose agents may be wont to point out any unfaithful party member and other sell-outs. It may also lead to bandwagon voting as some undecided voters are unlikely to openly identify with any scanty queues. Again, the system may not readily lend itself to diaspora voting as is currently being encouraged.
Indeed, if this homegrown voting arrangement had emanated from Ghana, Kenya or Rwanda, Nigerians would have embraced it wholeheartedly.
On the whole, defenders of Option A4 (including self) are of the opinion that the standard established by Prof. Nwosu in 1993 should be revisited and improved upon if Nigeria must achieve free, fair, credible and cost-effective polls, going forward.