‘It’ll stop rigging’ — Abaribe calls for electronic voting

Enyinnaya Abaribe, the incumbent senator representing Abia south district, says electronic voting will enthrone transparent and credible elections in the country if adopted.

Abaribe was re-elected for a sixth tenure in the upper chamber in the last Saturday’s national assembly election on the platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA).

The senator defected to APGA after Okezie Ikpeazu, governor of Abia, clinched the PDP ticket for the senatorial ticket.

Abaribe polled 49,693 votes to defeat Ikpeazu who came a distant third with 28,422 votes.

Speaking with journalists on Thursday, he said that it had become shameful that the country’s electoral process was still being conducted manually.

Abaribe said that the practice where result sheets were often mutilated with written, cancelled and re-written scores in the process of falsification to rig elections was degrading to the country’s image.

“I am one of those that believed that the process of the elections was flawed,” NAN quoted Abaribe as saying.

“But I call for calm and peace and people should resort to the legal means to redress the error.

“It is such a bloody shame that INEC will manipulate the scores of candidates.

“It happens because the result sheets are in the hands of INEC officials. We should introduce full electronic voting that is tamper-proof.

“It is possible. We are in electronic age. It is time we got adapted to modern technology. We cannot continue to play with our existence.”

The senator said that INEC dashed the people’s hope for a fair and credible exercise with its failure to achieve electronic transmission of results from the polling units to its portal.

“Throughout its planning stages, INEC kept assuring us that it was prepared to conduct credible elections so we thought that everything would work smoothly,” he said.

Abaribe said the transmission of results electronically failed, coupled with the failure of other logistics for the distribution of electoral materials.

“The sensitive materials did not arrive early and they were found in the hands of those who had no business with them,” he said.

Abaribe also promised to reward his constituents for their trust by remaining a strong and consistent voice in the national assembly.