2015 POLLS: CROSS RIVERS REC DENIES EVR, EMR USE

The Cross Rivers State Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC), today rejected the utilisation of Electronic Voter Register (EVR) or Electronic Manual Register (EMR) as a replacement of Card Readers for the March 28 and April 11 elections in the state.

The state IPAC Chairman, Goddie Akpama, accused officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and ad-hoc staff of currently undergoing training in the use of  EVR or EMR as an alternative for the card reader in the rescheduled election.

IPAC consequently charged political stakeholders to refuse  all forms of electoral fraud, which according to the council could be brewing in the state office of INEC.

Akpama said, "It must be noted here that we have it on good and impeccable authority that INEC staff and its ad-hoc recruits are being trained on the use of EVR or EMR as an alternative to card reader for the March and April general elections.

"It could be recalled that among other things, the National Chairman of INEC, Prof. Attahiru Jega, made it abundantly clear that the commission shall make use of the card reader solely for accreditation and not EVR.

"Jega further posited that if the card reader in a particular polling unit fails, INEC was going to make available a spare card reader to the affected area or postpone the election to the next day.

"But my interest on this is that the Resident Electoral Commissioner of Cross River, in the lectures we have attended and in the papers for the training of ad-hoc staff, he is doing a different thing from what the INEC national has put on record."

However in his reaction,
the state REC, Dr. Okey Ezeani, argued that it was not true that the commission was training its staff or ad-hoc staff for the use of EVR or EMR in the general elections.

In his words, "We are not training any person on the use of EVR. What we are doing is to train people on the use of card readers and that is what we will use for the election. We do not have any other training for any group of people."

Photo credit: Thisday