State level elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) \u00a0on March 18, for Governorship and State Houses of Assembly positions, again failed to meet expectations. Voters and observers who had hoped that the disappointing conduct of the February 25 Presidential and National Assembly elections will be mitigated, received no respite. It appears that political actors deployed a variety of tactics in their desperation to be declared winners of the elections. Speaking on the elections, the Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room noted that Nigeria missed another opportunity to deliver credible elections even at the grassroots level. The European Union Observation Mission to Nigeria stated that the elections did not meet the expectations of Nigerians, and that INEC lacked transparency even though some of its processes improved from the national level elections. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although there was some improvement in\nopening of polls, there were still some complaints about the Bi-Modal Voter\nAccreditation System (BVAS), which did not work optimally, even if it was an\nimprovement on the experience of February 25. In comparison with the national\nlevel elections of February 25, a higher level of violence and vote buying\ncharacterised by the use of cash, food items, fabrics and other materials were\nobserved. In addition, there was also a high level of voter intimidation and\nsuppression especially in places such as Lagos, Edo, Rivers, Imo, Sokoto,\nDelta, Ogun and several other States, where thugs denied voters access to\npolling units, attacked them or carted away with election materials. Journalists\nand election observers were not left out as several of them were attacked and\ninjured or stopped from covering the elections \nby thugs in some polling units. There were also reports of falsification\nof figures on result sheets at collation\ncentres and even invasion of collation centres by thugs and party agents in a\nbid to subvert the collation process. These led to the suspension of collation\nin places like Abia and Enugu States. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is safe to say that the 2023 general\nelections were an anti-climax, given all the anticipation in the lead-up to the\nelections fostered by innovations in the electoral system. Nigerians were\nlargely disappointed by the Presidential and National Assembly elections,\nparticularly the failed upload of election results to the IReV portal. Little\nwonder the State level elections witnessed low voter turnout as a result of\napathy among the voting population. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
State level elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) \u00a0on March 18, for Governorship and State Houses of Assembly positions, again failed to meet expectations. Voters and observers who had hoped that the disappointing conduct of the February 25 Presidential and National Assembly elections will be mitigated, received no respite. It appears that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1026,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3175"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3184,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175\/revisions\/3184"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}