OSUN State Resident Electoral Commissioner, Dr. Mutiu Agboke at the weekend affirmed that no INEC staff can assist any politician to manipulate election results, as a result of the technology now being used to conduct the exercises by the body.

The resident Commissioner who made this known in an interview with members of the OSUN state Correspondents Of the NUJ in Osogbo, stated that every activity of the commission right from day one till the end of any elections now being monitored in various platforms of the body.

According to him, “maybe people don’t know that. “On election days, the deployment of materials is being monitored on various platforms, including how materials are moving from CBN to local government. Even in the morning, the time you are deploying your material is being monitored on the dashboard and these are the things we use technology to achieve. We cannot be tired of the use of technology. ”

“I want to assure you commission believes in the technology, and we cannot shy away from that”.

“Over the years the commission has been developing year in and Year out, election in and election out and if you look at it from 2011 till date, the only thing that remains manual now is the actual casting of the ballot.”

“The registration is technology, the accreditation is technology, the verification of accreditation is technology even the process of uploading the results is technology that is not collation.”

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“The misconception in the public is that our opportunity of transparency which made us create the IREV platform is misinterpreted. IREV is not a platform for the collation, the actual collation is at the collation centre but we want you to have access to see what we are doing, that is why we upload it at each stage but people wanted to use that opportunity as a coalition platform that was what generated all the noises you have heard in the last election.”

“INEC will continue to deepen the process with the use of technology, as I’m talking to you the commissioner is looking at various options of technology that can be deployed and that is why year in and year out, we always have a point.”

“Look at the introduction of Bvas. So far as I seated, it has given us the certainty of our result, it gave us the certainty of accreditation because the number of people that voted in a particular unit cannot exceed the number of accredited voters.

On the prosecution of election offenders, Dr Agboke explained that, “the issue of prosecution of election offenders is a very complex situation, by section 145 or 146 of the Electoral Act INEC is the one that has a statutory responsibility to prosecute election offenders.

” IPO’s job is to do the preliminary investigation visit the scene of the crime, get the details of the accused person put everything together then the file will be duplicated, which means the entire investigation processes are completed and the file is handed over.”

“In Osun State, I can tell you now we have one prosecution to carry out.”

“I want to assure you we would beep our satellite in those areas, but my latitude is to carry out activities that will reduce the tension for anybody to commit a crime. That’s why we are going to engage the security very well, he submitted.

NIGERIAN TRIBUNE