A group dedicated to youth empowerment and mobilization for political participation, transparency and accountability, Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth and Advancement(YIAGA) Africa, has scored the recently held gubernatorial poll in Edo State low.
The group made its findings known in a post election meeting with CSO leaders and media partners held in Benin City on Thursday morning.
Yiaga stated that it arrived at its conclusion having discovered that the poll failed the integrity test/standards as deployed by its 300 stationary and 25 roving observers covering a representative sample of polling units across all the 18 local government areas of the state.
To address the anomalies associated with the election, Yiaga Africa among others called for the immediate investigation and prosecution of polling officials and collation officers engaged in results manipulation and flagrant violations of the guidelines on results collation.
It also called on the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC) “to urgently clarify the inconsistencies in some of the results, especially election results from Oredo, Egor and Esan West Local Government Areas.”
Going further, Yiaga recommended that “INEC should issue detailed guidelines for exercising its powers to review declarations and returns made contrary to provisions of the electoral act and regulations and guidelines. This should include procedures for receiving complaints, timeframe, format and who is eligible to submit complaints.
“It’s imperative to integrate the IReV and electronic transmission of results into the electoral legal framework to confer legality on polling unit level results uploaded on the portal. To this end the National Assembly should expeditiously amend the electoral act to make electronic transmission of results mandatory.”
On impartiality test, Yiaga stated that “reports of interference during the results collation proccess, including the denial of access to accredited observers and party agents at collation centres, cast doubt on the neutrality of some security personnel.”
According to Yiaga, “drastic steps are now needed for fundamental electoral reforms to restore public confidence in the electoral process, especially the urgent need for political actors to change their attitude towards politics.”
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