Nigerians will today, (Saturday, March 18, 2023) return to the polls to elect governors and state assembly members.
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 Houses of Assembly seats. This data is according to statistics by the Independent National Electoral Commission (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.
Technology to the rescue
For this year’s polls, the electoral umpire deployed the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System and its Result Viewing Portal (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.
INEC has again said the technologies will be deployed for the March 18 polls, saying the glitches recorded at the presidential and National Assembly polls weeks ago have been addressed.
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.
Recall that the Presidential and National Assembly elections held nationwide on February 25. INEC has since declared candidate of the APC winner and President-Elect.
