Prof. Mahmood Yakubu who is the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has assured that the commission is battle-ready for any form of glitches that might occur with regard to the real-time transmission of election results from the polling units during the presidential and National Assembly election.
He pointed out that the commission actually anticipated two challenges in the form of technical and malicious act, stressing that the commission is ready to deal with them.
‘On the question of what the commission is going to do in the event of glitches, particularly with regard to the real time transmission of election results from the polling units. We anticipate two challenges. The first one is technical. The second one is malicious act.
‘On the technical side, we have been working, the commission engineers have been working, but for several months we have been interfacing with the mobile network operators, the big four, the MTN of this world, the Glo, the Airtel and the Nine Mobile and we have gone so far in relationship with them that in all the states of the federation at the nationals situation room here in Abuja, we are going to walk with them. In fact, they are going to be embedded in my own situation.’
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‘So, whether a technical issues is capacity, particularly from the mobile network operators to respond to these challenges. On the possibility of malicious act, I said this separately that any organisation or institution that maintains web presence must anticipate some attempt for some compromise, either internally within the organization over militia but we have taken sufficient steps to fortify and protect our systems and processes.
‘Like the Inspector General of Police who is keeping certain things to himself, I must also keep certain things when it comes to cyber security of our assets to ourselves because the walls have ears, but Nigeria should be rest assured that we are aware that our assets and resources may be susceptible to attack.
“However, we have taken measures after all, we have tremendous experience of having transmitted results in real time in elections in Nigeria beginning from the Nasarawa Central State constituency by election August 2022 to the last governorship elections in July last year, in Osun State, we have successfully transmitted results for 105 constituencies nationwide.’
‘So, please rest assured that we are aware of the challenges and we have a capacity within the commission to respond to the challenges. After all, the BVAS is not an electronic voting machine. It will not operate online on election day. It is completely offline. Where we need a bit of secure internet connectivity is where we transmit results from the polling units and we are on top of the game, he assured.