As at 7.30 pm on Saturday, Nigerian Tribune checks on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)’s portals showed that the election umpire had uploaded results from 2,400 polling units out of the 3009 polling units in the Ondo State governorship candidate election.
Actual polling in the election, in which three political gladiators: the incumbent Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Mr Eyitayo Jegede, SAN, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the incumbent deputy governor, Mr Agboola Ajayi are slugging it out for the race to occupy Alagbaka Government House, started at 8.00 am.
Like it did in the Nasarawa National Assembly bye-election, where it first deployed its new results collation technology, Z-Pad, and later at the statewide guber election in Edo State on September 19, INEC equally deployed the technology in the Ondo governorship election.
Z-Pad is INEC’s innovation at ensuring a seamless election and it entails the use of a result capturing device, which enables the electoral body to upload results from the polling units directly to its website, right on the spot of sorting and counting of ballots.
The technology eliminates the age-long threat of hoodlums highjacking election results fon the way to either the ward or LGA collation centre.
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As promised by the INEC chairman, Professor Mahood Yakubu, the idea of Z-Pad is to ensure that the entire voting population and the general public can monitor the progress of results collation from the comfort of their homes.
One other advantage of the technology, Nigerian Tribune discovered is that it bridges the time between when results are sorted, counted and announced at the polling units and when such results are finally collated.
For instance, in the case of the September 19 election in Edo State, the two major political parties in the election, the PDP and the APC, keying into the Z-Pad innovation, were able to set up their situation rooms and downloaded all the submitted results from the INEC portal for personal collation.
Nigerian Tribune further observed that with the rate at which the results were being uploaded to the portal in the Ondo State guber election, the Central Collation Centre might open earlier than expected.
In Akoko South/West LGA for instance, Nigerian Tribune observed that results from 165 polling units out of the total 168 units in the council area had been submitted as at 6.18 pm.
The same pattern was also noticed in Ifedore LGA, where INEC had uploaded results from149 units out of 151 as at 7.24 p.m.
and then