The Independent National Electoral Commission has planned to spend N117bn on electoral technologies in line with its decision to deploy the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System and the Result Viewing Portal in the 2023 elections.
This came as the commission is also investing in top-notch cyber security systems to ward off attacks by hackers against its servers, website and database.
The amount represents 33.4 per cent of its N305b budget for the polls, according to the INEC Election Project Plan for the 2023 elections obtained by our correspondent on Wednesday.
The INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, had said there was no going back on the commission’s vow to use technology, including BVAS and IReV portal in the forthcoming polls despite protests by the Presidential candidate and chieftains of a major political party.
He had also complained that the commission’s result viewing portal came under attack from hackers during the Ekiti and Osun governorship elections.
The INEC chairman, who disclosed this at a stakeholders’ conference on election result management in Abuja, stated, ‘’Our engineers reported several cyber attacks on the portal during the Ekiti and Osun governorship elections; some of them from as far as Asia. I am glad to note that all of them failed. We have tasked our engineers to do everything possible to fully protect the IReV and all our web resources.”
The electoral body’s election plan indicates that the bulk of the N117bn earmarked for technologies was spent on the procurement in foreign currency of a new voter enrolment and voter accreditation device meant to combine the functions of the Direct Data Capture Machine, the Z-Pad and the Smart Card Reader.
