The Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Prof. Mahmood Yakubu has disclosed that the commission will introduce electronic voting in 2021 Anambra governorship election.
Yakubu made this known in an interview with journalists during a budget defence session with the House of Reps Committee on Electoral Matters on Wednesday in Abuja.
He said, “It is difficult to give you an idea of cost or when the process would be concluded, but we are determined that we are going to deploy electronic voting machines, electronic balloting machines very soon in our elections.
“As a result, the commission decided to look inward, we have the INEC fund established under Section 3 of the INEC Act where we have some savings from previous budgets because we are not expected to remit unspent funds.
“We are on the first line charge and because of the peculiarities of our work, it is in the realisation of this that the parliament in amending the Electoral Act introduced the INEC fund for a number of reasons.
“One, that we cannot be truly independent if we are not financially independent, secondly, there are so many commitments that arise in the middle of a financial year and we cannot meet these obligations except some source of funding.
“So many by-elections had risen unforeseen, and the constitution has prescribed time limits for conducting such elections.
“For example, if constituents decide to call back a member, this is not what you can project at the beginning of a fiscal year, so we have the fund, established since 2010 and we have been growing it since then.
“I, however, urge the Senate to approve the spending of N5.2 billion from the special INEC fund to make up for the shortfall in the 2020 budget which was reduced due to the Coronavirus pandemic,” he added.
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