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Festus Okoye, the INEC National Electoral Commissioner for information and voter Education denied getting involved in rigging the by-election held in Ogoja-Yala federal constituency, Cross River state for APC.
Recall that the chairman of PDP in the state, Venatius Ikem addressed a news conference in Calabar, accusing Mr Okoye who supervised the by-elections of February 26 of compromising his office and rigging the exercise for APC.
In his defense, Mr. Okoye explained that it would be very difficult for anyone to rig election due to the Biomodal Voter Accreditation system (BVAS) machine deployed for the exercise.
He added that persons who had plans to rig the election but couldn’t turned back to forcefully accuse him.
“The challenge we had was that some of the political parties did not make provision for vehicles to accompany the voting materials to the polling units (PU). So, at each stage, the two major political parties had their representatives at the PU.
“These anxiety and anger arose because those who used to hawk voting materials like permanent voters’ cards did not have opportunity to corrupt the system this time around because of BVAS.
“BVAS was able to read the face and fingerprints of accredited voters. In the event that the machine could not do so, it means that the person would have been involved in identity theft, meaning that he was not registered at that PU, and the voter card he was holding was not his.
“That’s why you saw the level of contest and consistency in the numbers of votes scored by each party. Compare this with what used to occur when we used Incident Form. So, it tells you that those that vote at each PU were those registered there,” he stated.
Mr Okoye said that all measures were employed to ensure that the votes of the people counted.