•Nasarawa, 64.3%; Niger, 64.3%; Taraba 62%; Kano, 52.6%

Despite the supposed good intentions of Professor Attahiru Jega, National Chairman of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, the much touted magic of the Smart Card Reader, SCRs, may have suddenly become a victim of the Nigerian syndrome. Whereas there had been clamour for Jega to use the Card Readers at previous elections (like Ekiti and Osun States) with a view to perfecting the use of the machines before this year’s more sensitive and strategic general elections, the INEC Chairman behaved as though every other opinion did not matter.

Now that the chicken has come home to roost, last weekend’s test of the machines showed a negative, though curious rate of failure in some states of the North. Worse still, the question that Jega would need to respond to is: Why did some states of the North, with a magnificent and tantalizingly high collection rate of the Permanent Voter Cards, PVCs, record this very negative rate of the SCR tests?

By Jide Ajani

If the revelations of the pilot exercise conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in all the zones of the country can be taken with the empiricism of a quantitative research, then the enthusiastic endorsement of the Smart Card Reader, SCRs, by the All Progressives Congress (APC) may have been ill-advised and misplaced. Reason: Professor Attahiru Jega, INEC’s Chairman, would need to explain to Nigerians why the failure rate of the machines in the North comes with the unpalatable prospects of depriving the APC of votes in that beleaguered region of Nigeria.

It has emerged that many areas where APC may consider as strongholds experienced dismal failure rates with the use of the SCRs.

Take, for instance, the case of Kano – which has the largest voting population of the entire 19 states of the North. There, the success rate of the Card Readers was 47.4% – meaning that less than 5 out of 10 times the Card Reader failed to authenticate potential voters.

In Nasarawa State the outcome was even worse – the Card Readers had a failure rate of 64.3%, equal to a success rate of merely 35.7%.

In practical terms, it means that if 10 people were to line up for verification on election day in Nasarawa, only about four people will be successfully verified by the Card Reader.

Even areas of the North with some level of success were merely marginal.

For instance in Bauchi, the success rate was merely 59.1 out of 1,511 accreditation attempts conducted. Described in real terms this means that out of the 1,511 people who attempted to verify their PVCs, only 893 were successful whereas 618 failed.

THE CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER OF INCIDENT FORMS

But INEC has provided a window – and a very suspect one at that as has been explained by Sunday Vanguard weeks ago because, substituting the security of the SCRs with a manually processed paper with the possibility of being subjected to the whims and caprices of possibly suspect staff, would create a fertile ground for massive rigging.

Therefore, it is now a matter of quandary how INEC will be able to handle situations where about 50% of voters in the North may need to fill Incident Forms on the day of election. This may turn out to be an actuarial and logistical nightmare, because if a state has two million voters and has 50% voter turnout, it means that, given the failure rates of about 40 to 50% in the North where there is a voter turnout of 50% in the hypothetical case above, out of the one million voters, about 400,000 may need to fill Incident Forms.

Now, filling an Incident Form may eat into the minutes saved by using Card Readers. To illustrate further, if 150 voters out of 400, who show up in a polling unit of 500 people, need to fill Incident Forms, it means that, if each of the voters take a minimum of eight minutes for the INEC polling officer to fill their Incident Forms, they will use 8 X 150 minutes or 1,200 minutes to fill the forms; this, when divided by 60 minutes to calculate, the number of hours 150 people will use in filling the forms means that about 20 hours will be required in a polling unit just to fill Incident Forms.

Whereas it is not possible to predict the impact this may have on the accreditation process, given that it is not possible to tell ahead how many people will actually need to fill the Incident Forms on election day, but given the pilot results from the North, it can be expected that many more Incident Forms will likely be filled in the region. Now, how can INEC handle possible situations where those who fill the Incident Forms exceed the people verified by the SCRs; such an outcome certainly makes the Card Readers unhelpful!

To highlight how this may be a further handicap, Kebbi State had a success rate for accreditations of mere 54.3%; in Niger State, the success rate was 58.1%. With such outcomes, it is doubtful that the use of Card Readers will go ahead without many hitches in the North on the day of election, except INEC has devised a speedy approach to tackle these potential hindrances.

CURIOUS TWISTS

While the failure rate in the North was rife, the success rate in the South was high.

In Delta State, for instance, the success rate was 92.0%. In Lagos, the success rate was 91.4%; in Rivers, it was 81.6%; in Ekiti, it was 67.4% – only Ebonyi State had a dismal success rate, about the worst nation-wide with a success rate of 3.4% or a failure rate of 96.6%.

From these data, it can be inferred that election day will come with many new surprises for the politicians, surprises which may fall far short of their pre-election permutations, particularly in the North where many voters are likely to confront technology adaptation in one very eventful day.

Well, for states in the North with high technology uptake in information technology, this may not be a problem. But for those with poor IT uptake amongst the population, they may just have to hope that the pilot testing conducted by INEC does not correlate fully with the election day accreditation because, if they are a reflection of election day reality as all pilot studies are meant to be, then voters in many parts of the North may have a very eventful outing on March 28.

That is not all.

INEC sources have told Sunday Vanguard that the sample of voters used in all the areas in the South where the pilots were conducted were statistically insignificant. They point to Delta and Lagos, for instance, where only less than 700 accreditations were used to compute the results, and observe that these were less than the total number of voters in many polling units in Lagos and several polling units in Delta. According to our usually dependable sources, if as many as 1,500 observations were made in these places as they were in places like Kano and Kebbi, the results may have been different. Therefore, if these observations can be taken as significant, then the whole nation may indeed be headed for an eventful day on March 28.

Worse still, the much touted collection rate for the PVCs in the North, curious as it is, was merely explained away by Jega as a function of enthusiasm – that if the people in a section of the country (he was referring to the North) choose to come out en masse to collect their PVCs while people in other parts of the country (South) are not keen about collecting their cards, how does that become his problem?

On the day of election, the security agents and party officials accredited to be at polling units or voting points would need to be on alert to ensure that those without PVCs that belong to them should not be allowed anywhere near the voting points.

In addition, the multitude of the under-aged who throng political campaign rallies for the two leading parties and who come out believing they would vote should not only be stopped but they should also be arrested.

Furthermore, the use of Incident Forms should be properly looked into by INEC such that a conspiracy between its staff and party bigwigs would not translate into a situation where politicians just sit in one room and fill the forms while using the thousands of stolen and domiciled PVCs.

That is the only way Jega can save his integrity. That is the only way the elections can be free, fair and credible. That is the only way votes can count.

But not addressing the plethora of incongruities arising from the massive collection of PVCs in the North with high the failure rates recorded while testing the SCRs, would open INEC, one way or another, to the allegation of bias, partisanship and unconscionable manipulation of the process to favour one candidate over another.