Ahead of Saturday’s governorship elections in Ondo State, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has announced the deployment of 4,002 Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines.
The Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) for Ondo, Oluwatoyin Babalola, shared this update with journalists on Friday in Akure.
“We are ready. We have created enough voter awareness through the multiple channels we deployed for the exercise,” she said.
In addition, 812 reserve BVAS machines have been allocated in case of any faults with the primary machines.
Mrs Babalola highlighted that the commission has recruited and trained ad-hoc staff, including Supervisory Polling Officers (SPOs), presiding officers, and assistant presiding officers.
The commission has also briefed over 30,000 security personnel on its operations, ensuring smooth election conduct.
“The security agencies have given us assurance. We trained them on the need to be professional and the need to be committed to the job they engage in,” she added.
She also pointed out that training focused on ensuring security officers understand INEC’s processes.
“We also taught them our process. You know, when you don’t know someone else’s process, some things you think are not right, some things you think are wrong. So we have trained them and they have cascaded this training to their commands,” she said.
Mrs Babalola also confirmed that the Registration Area Centres (RACs) are being activated earlier than usual to guarantee timely deployment of voting materials to polling units.
“As I speak with you now, most vehicles are on their way to the RAC because we are going to activate RACs very early. We don’t want to activate RACs in the night so that they would have settled in and they’ll be ready for the election tomorrow,” she concluded.