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The Independent National Electoral Commission has embarked on the formulation of its Election Project Plan in preparation for the 2027 general election.
A top official in the commission disclosed this to Saturday PUNCH.
The official stated that lessons learnt from the 2023 general election were being applied to the planning for 2027.
He disclosed that the commission was already updating its election templates for the upcoming election cycle, with the goal of improving the efficiency and reliability of its processes.
The official said, “The formulation also includes the production of the 2027 – 2031 Strategic Plan to replace the current 2022 – 2026 Strategic Plan, which ends in December next year.
“An important aspect of the current effort is the preparation of another critical document that will act as a bridge between 2026 and 2027 – the general election year – which the current 2022- 2026 plan does not cover. This particular document will provide the foundation for the 2027 EPP document.
“While the 2022-2026 Strategic Plan prioritised the institutionalisation of the commission’s processes for the delivery of its mandate, focusing on capacity building, promotion of professionalism, encouraging synergy among departments and improving efficient mobilisation and utilisation of resources among others over a four-year cycle, the EPP is a comprehensive document that focuses solely on a general election.”
Findings by Saturday PUNCH revealed that the EPP was first produced for the 2015 general election. Since then, EPPs were produced for subsequent 2019 and 2023 general elections.
Following the challenges faced during the 2023 general election, INEC is refining its processes to ensure smoother operations in future polls.
According to reports, the commission faced a few logistical and technical hurdles during the 2023 general election while managing a voter base of 93,469,008 registered voters across 176,846 polling units.
The election saw the deployment of over 1.5 million personnel, including polling staff, supervisors, and security personnel, along with 182,491 vehicles to facilitate the voting process across Nigeria’s diverse terrains.
Reports indicated that despite the extensive preparations, one of the significant issues during the 2023 election was the difficulty in uploading presidential election results to the INEC Result Viewing portal.
While the system successfully managed uploads for the National Assembly elections, the presidential election results faced delays due to technical glitches.
The root cause of the issue was traced to a configuration problem that prevented the system from properly mapping the presidential results, which are countrywide, as opposed to state-specific elections.
The commission later addressed the issue with software updates, and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded later in the evening on the election day.
