The Kano State INEC Resident Electoral Commissioner, Prof. Risqua Arabu, has said communities which frustrate the use of card readers will have their votes cancelled.
Arabu claimed there were communities in Kano that frustrated the use of card readers during the presidential and National Assembly elections.
He said that unknown to those communities, their votes did not count because they were cancelled.
According to him, the commission also discovered cases of incompetence on the part of some of its staff from the presidential and National Assembly elections.
“There were few challenges we experienced from the last presidential elections and we took note of the complaints that came.
“What most people didn’t know was that in a number of polling units, members of our staff were forced to stop using card readers by communities.
“The law is very clear and our guidelines clearly state that where communities deliberately avoid the use of card readers, they score zero and that is what we did and this led to a number of cancellations,” he said, adding, “We had a few cases of incompetence displayed by some of our staff. We have reviewed them and we have replaced some of them, we have also reviewed our strategy of monitoring the use of the card readers.”
He explained that as part of the commission’s strategy to maximise the use of the card readers, committees had been set up at various levels to periodically review their functions by receiving regular reports of performance and intervening whenever the need arose.
On the commission’s level of preparedness for Saturday’s governorship election in Kano, Arabu said the distribution of sensitive materials would be completed on Friday.
He said, “Within the next few hours, we hope to finish distributing the material to local government areas so that they can sort them and batch them according to the registration areas on time.
“From our planning, by tomorrow afternoon, all the wards should have their materials so that by Saturday morning, God willing, we will open the polls at 8 o’clock.”
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