Over 200 million Nigerians are in anxious wait for winners of the March 18, 2023 governorship and state assembly elections as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) begins the upload of results electronically on its Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
Checks by our correspondent on the IReV portal as 9am showed that between 60% and 90% of polling unit results have been uploaded for the 28 states where governorship elections were held on Saturday.
For Yobe, 2,294 polling unit results have been submitted out of the total 2,823 PU results in the state.
In Zamfara, 2,125 PU results have been uploaded out of 3,529. 1,834 have been uploaded out of 3,597 PU results in Taraba. 2,847 PU results have been uploaded out of 3991 PUs in Sokoto
For Rivers, 4,889 results have been uploaded out of 6,866 PUs in the oil-rich Niger Delta state. In Plateau, 4,408 results have been transmitted to the IReV portal out of 4,989 PUs in the state.
In Oyo, 6, 018 results of the 6,390 total PUs can be sighted on the portal. 4,849 of 5,042 results have been uploaded in Ogun. In Niger, 3,098 of 4,950 results have been transmitted.
For Nasarawa, 2,993 of 3,256 results are up. In Lagos, 9,662 of 13,325 PU results are up for public view. 2,412 of the 2,887 PU results for Kwara are up. In Kebbi, 2,334 of 3,743 are up. In Katsina, 5,215 of the 6,652 results are up.
In Kano, 7,014 of the 11,222 PU results are up. 6,513 of the 8,012 in Kaduna have been uploaded. In Jigawa, 3,599 of the 4,522 are up. In Gombe, 2,129 of the 2,988 results are up. In Enugu, 3,811 of the 4,145 PU results are up.
For Ebonyi, 2,558 of 2,946 are up while in Delta, 3,945 of 5,863 PU results are up. In Cross River, 2,367 of 3,281 are up. In Borno, 3,087 of the 5,071 PU results are up.
In Benue, 4,007 of 5,102 results have been uploaded. In Bauchi, 4,120 of 5,423 are up. For Akwa Ibom, 3,375 of 4,353 are up. In Adamawa 3,600 of the 4,104 results are up. In Abia, 3,183 of 4,062 PU results are up.
For governorship polls, results of the polling units are expected to be collated at the ward levels by INEC staff, in the presence of party agents and electoral observers, then transferred to the local governments and then collated at the state levels for onward declaration of winners by Resident Electoral Commissioners.
Voting ended at exactly 2.30pm at most polling units across the over 170,000 polling units in the country on Saturday. Sorting and counting immediately commenced. In some parts of the country, violent attacks, ballot box snatching, delays and more marred the polls while elections in a few local governments and polling units were postponed to Sunday.
11 Govs Seek Reelection
With February 25 Presidential and National Assembly elections concluded and results declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission, albeit with the attendant legal tussles following, the battlegrounds have shifted to states.
In all, 18 political parties fielded candidates for the governorship elections slated to hold in 28 out of the 36 states of the Federation.
This is so because the governorship elections of eight states (Anambra, Bayelsa, Edo, Ekiti, Imo, Kogi, Osun and Ondo) are held off-season due to litigations and court judgements.
Be it as it may, elections for members of state legislature will hold in the 36 states of the Federation.
Thousands of candidates are competing for 993 State House of Assembly seats. This data is according to statistics by INEC.
In alphabetical order, the 28 states where governorship elections will hold on March 18, 2023 are: Abia, Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Benue, Borno, Cross River, Delta, Ebonyi, Enugu, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Kwara, Lagos, Nasarawa, Niger, Ogun, Oyo, Plateau, Rivers, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe, Zamfara.
Of the 28 states, 11 serving governors are seeking reelection while 17 outgoing governors are in the final weeks of their constitutional two-term limits of eight years, having been sworn in on May 29, 2015.
New Tech
For this year’s polls, the electoral umpire deployed the BVAS and IReV. The IReV and the BVAS are new technologies introduced by the electoral body for the accreditation and electronic transmission of votes for this year’s polls.
Despite the glitches that marred the presidential and National Assembly polls weeks ago, INEC deployed BVAS and IReV for the March 18 polls, saying there will be improvements.
However, opposition political parties such as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP) are skeptical of the process. The opposition parties have also condemned the Presidential election which produced a former Lagos State governor, Bola Tinubu, who was the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the President-Elect. The PDP and the LP argued that INEC failed to electronically transmit results from the over 170,000 polling units to the IReV portal as prescribed by Section 60 of the Electoral Act 2022.ct 2022.
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