ECNBA, Candidates, ICT Experts Agree Modalities for Election

The stage is now set for commencement of activities leading to this year’s Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Election as the ECNBA has agreed modalities for the election with the stakeholders.

This is in line with the electoral reforms initiated by NBA President, Mr. Abubakar Mahmoud SAN in the wake of controversies that trailed the appointment of CHAMS Plc as the sole ICT Partner for the election.

Following several stakeholder meetings on the matter, Mahmoud has among others stated that “The ECNBA will ensure that the candidates and their technical representatives are given appropriate access to all processes and given opportunity to make inputs/observations at all stages of the process.”

CITY LAWYER gathered that a key feature of the resolutions reached at the meeting of ECNBA with the technical experts of the candidates indicated that the experts will be given substantial access to track the verification, voting and audit processes for the election.

Aside from the verification exercise, the technical experts shall have access to “review the source code of the voting platform,” a source who was at the meeting stated.

Also, the candidates’ agents and technical experts will have real-time view of the number of votes cast for each candidate.

Other resolutions are:
• Fresh verification of eligible voter to be done by a new ICT company.

• Technical agents of candidates to approve and agree on process prior to commencement of verification.

• Technical agents of candidates shall be allowed to review the tools and systems of the ICT Company

• ECNBA shall publish final list of verified voters in a branch by branch model for branch complaints and confirmation.

• Technical Agents of candidates shall have access to review the source code of the voting platform.

• Technical Agents of candidates shall serve as collation agents of the presidential candidates and be allowed pre-commencement access to check security of voting platform.

• Technical Agents of Presidential candidates shall have remote and local monitoring access to the back-end of the voting platform, as deployed by the ICT provider, throughout the voting process until the declaration of final results.

• Real-time view of number of active voters on voting platform shall be provided to the Agents and Technical Agents of candidates.

• Real-time view of number of active Administrators on voting platform shall be provided to the Agents and Technical Agents of candidates.

• Real-time view of audit trail of voting platform shall be provided to the Technical Agents of candidates.

• Real-time view of number of votes cast per candidate shall be provided to Agents and Technical Agents of candidates.

It is instructive that these measures were absent during the last National Officers election in 2016, leading to controversies and the charge by the defeated presidential candidate, Chief Joe-Kyari Gadzama SAN that the election was rigged.

In line with the revised time-table released by ECNBA, fresh verification exercise will commence on Thursday and end on Saturday while voting will hold from Monday till Tuesday, July 31, 2018.

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