About 3.67 million people in Lagos have collected their Permanent Voter Cards ahead of the general elections in March and April, the Resident Electoral Commissioner, Akin Orebiyi disclosed in Sunrise Daily, a morning programme on Channels Television.
The agency now has an outstanding of about 1.8 million cards which members of the electorate are yet to collect, while 430,000 are still being expected from Abuja.
“I think, by next week we should have them”, Orebiyi said, assuring residents that they were working to ensure that the cards would be ready before the set deadline for collection, March 8th.
Giving updates on the collection, the REC noted that officials would be stationed at the polling units for the next two weekends, to enable residents have easy access, while collection will hold at their Local Government office on weekdays.
“INEC is ready. There has been significant progress since the postponement. Staff are being trained. We will all stay in one place on the eve of the election and move to different centres early on the election day. There will be security and if there is none, we will move out”.
Mr Orebiyi also made an attempt to allay fears of possible foul play on election days, by demonstrating how the card readers work with the PVCs, adding that all card readers are configured to work in their assigned polling units.
“It cannot work elsewhere” he said, noting that no one can use any card that does not belong to them.
While explaining how the device works, Orebiyi pointed out that the thumb is the key to accreditation as a card holder will also need his thumb to further verify the ownership of the card.
“If you have 750 registered voters in a unit, the machine will record those who have voted and transmit directly to the central unit. So if what you write is different from what is recorded and stored as votes, the fraud will reflect”.
