The Transformation Monitoring Group has condemned the act of vote-buying recorded at the just-concluded Ekiti governorship election on Saturday.
A statement by the group’s chairman, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, made available to newsmen on Tuesday alleged that politicians used public funds to woo voters during the election.
Rafsanjani said that Vote-buying was observed across the 16 local government areas of the state with political parties bidding for the votes of electorates.
The group also commended INEC for deploying Security operatives at the polling units on time and voters for their comportment at the various polling centres.
TMG also noted that priority voting was given to voters such as People Living with Disabilities, elderly persons and pregnant women in most of the polling units in the state.
The group reveals that reports from field observers indicate that it takes at least 3 minutes to accredit a voter using the BVAS in 41% of the locations observed and that going by that, the BVAS would have successfully accredited 20 voters per hour on the average in the affected voting locations.
However, the group noted that INEC’s strategy of voters’ redistribution failed to address the problem of over-concentration of voters in some polling units, thereby urging INEC on the need to double its effort to improve the turnaround time of the BVAS to one minute per voter for a seamless process on Election Day.
