The Electoral Officer, Kaduna North Local Government, Mr Mustapha Ibrahim, has blamed poor logistics arrangements in distributing electoral material for the delay in a council election in the area.
In an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Saturday in Kaduna, Ibrahim said the delay emanated from the ward and not the distribution centre.
As far as we are concerned, we started our distribution as early as 5:30 a.m., and it has been going on, considering the size of the local government. We started from the lower to the bigger ones.
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“The vehicles they brought to us were small buses, and a single bus cannot take more than ten electronic voting machines; that also contributed to the delay.
“So far, the election has commenced, operating the machines also posed some challenges as people thought the same machine used in the 2018 elections would be used today.
“I told them there are some improvements in the machine. This time around is one man, one vote”.
He said that unlike previously when you could swap the authorisation card to hibernate and bring out the political parties logo, this time around, the permanent voters’ card was swapped to hibernate the machine.
“You now need your voters’ card, and if it’s not for the polling unit, the machine will reject it, and if you go the second time, it will tell you it is either the card does not belong to the polling unit or you have voted somewhere”.
Ibrahim said voting was expected to end at about 4:00 p.m. The result was expected to be announced at the collation centre and the unit and ward levels. (NAN)
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the election commenced at 11:00 am in most polling units.