March 22, 2023 10:20 AMThe permeation of technology in the lives of people stems from its dilution of the complications faced by people in their day-to-day lives. This impact is noticeably felt in human communication as the timeframe within which messages are sent and received has been made seamless and swift irrespective of the distance between the sender and the receiver.
Some of these responsibilities include the undertaking and supervision of elections, registering political parties monitoring political campaigns in the election amongst others. Under the item, the INEC is also obligated to carry out responsibilities imposed on it as well as exercise powers conferred on it by the act of the National Assembly. The National Assembly in the exercise of its own powers enacted the Electoral Act of 2022 and it was signed into law by the president on February 25, 2022.
The electronic transmission of the result entails the upload of the result to the INEC Result Viewing Portal . This is to ensure the availability of the result copies from the polling units to INEC. The regulation permits recourse by the electoral body to the electronically transmitted copies where it is inconsistent with the result that is physically collated. The electronic transmission of results is limited to the polling unit as it does not extend to the wards.
The other faction opines that the electronic transmission of results is without any alternative virtue of the purport of Clause 38, as the manual transmission is highly likely to be affected by malpractice thus giving freedom to the mischief that the regulation intends to curb.
Also, in acknowledgement of the potential for ambiguity in construing words, the court picks whichever is equitable in light of the surrounding circumstances. In light of the nascent technology status of Nigeria, it is therefore equitable to state that various other means of transfer should be available alongside electronic transmission, as Nigeria’s technology space avails much room for improvement.