Electronic voting: INEC needs input from National Assembly – Senate President

Tunde Opalana, Abuja

The President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan has said that implementation of electronic voting being  canvassed for future elections by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), will require the National Assembly engaging the electoral umpire on the nitty gritty of the proposal.

He said there should be a robust engagement between INEC and lawmakers in both chambers of the National Assembly to fashion out an implementatable electoral process which include the electronic voting.

The Senate President said this in an interview over the weekend ahead of a year anniversary of the inauguration of the Ninth Assembly.

He said: “This is something we need to sit down with INEC, because INEC is the operator of the electoral environment, and anything it thinks is necessary for us to operate during this time of COVID-19 challenge, we should look into it but before then, we believe that the electoral environment should be as dynamic as it is, should receive our attention that will make it possible for elections to hold and outcomes to achieve the integrity that we will have the confidence of voters. 

“I don’t want to comment too much on what INEC said because they need to explain to us what they mean by e-voting, the scope, what type of technologies they are going to deploy, how they are going to do it. I don’t want to comment further on that so that I don’t cause, unnecessary debate about it”. 

Lawan also announced the readiness of the Ninth Assembly to carry out constitutional as well as electoral reforms.

“We want to do constitutional amendment as well as amendment of the electoral act to further make the process better and we want to see a situation where all pre-election matters are determined before the elections, that’s to say that if there are issues regarding the primaries by political parties and their candidates, then such legal matters should be settled, before anybody is presented for election so that you don’t go with pre-election problems or matters into the general election. 

“We want to ensure that in our constitutional amendment, local government autonomy is further entrenched because we’ve lost it, we don’t talk about local governments anymore like they don’t exist. 

“This is a tier of government that can do a lot to help us to deal with small and local issues. We believe that we should work to ensure that local government autonomy is protected by the constitution.

We have a lot of interest in ensuring that we carry out constitutional amendment as well as working on the electoral act. 

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“But for the electoral act the emphasis will be to engage with major stakeholders. INEC is the one that operates most of these things so we need to have a clear understanding of what they need so that we are able to give them that”, he stated. 

In the same vein, he promised that the National Assembly will look at constitutional way of getting community policing because of over – centralization of the police. 

Lawan ssid “I think there’s a consensus on how we should community policing. The police force has been working hard to ensure that it establishes the community policing in all the states.

“We had serious engagement with them, we had a report of our adhoc committee on security and that report was very emphatic on the need to decentralize and disaggregate the police force as it is today.

we believe that security especially at there’s participation at local level. We are working on it.”