Professor Attahiru Jega
The chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Attahiru Jega, has reacted to allegation of permanent voter cards (PVCs) being cloned, describing such endeavor as futile since the commission’s machines will not be able to read them.
The professor of Political Science explained to Metropole magazine that the PVCs are embedded with chips that contain data and fingerprints of each individual registered voter – which means cloned ones would not work as there would be card readers on the day of election.
It will be recalled that the Department of State Services (DSS) recently raided a facility where it alleged the All Progressives Congress (APC) was attempting to clone voters’ cards and hack into INEC’s database. APC has however denied the allegation in strong terms.
According to the INEC boss, “DSS did not say INEC reported. DSS are in the business of intelligence gathering and security and evidently through their own sources had something to make them act the way that they did. We did not report it. We didn’t ask them to do it and we didn’t know anything like that was happening.
“All I can say is that I know the investment that we made on the permanent voters’ cards, and it is very difficult if not impossible for anybody to clone it. If people clone the card, how are they going to get it read? You can clone it and make it look like an INEC card visibly but the card has to be read on election day using a card reader.
“You must have the card reader and the configuration and everything to do it, and it’s simply impossible. But that does not take anything away from the security agency for trying to do what they believe is their job,” he said.
Jega, who noted that the permanent voter card was introduced to arrest past irregularities in the electoral process, assured that only those with authentic PVCs will vote in the February general elections. He pledged that the commission would ensure that all registered voters can collect their permanent cards before the elections.
According to him, “In the past, people can buy cards and give to other people to vote. People can vote several times in the course of the day and we believe that it is very important that we have a device that can help us ensure that people can vote only once and the card reader will help us do that.
“You recall that during the registration, once you register, we give you a temporary voter’s card. But we have cleaned that register and removed all the duplicates so anyone who has done multiple registrations will only have one permanent voter’s card. If you now say let’s go back and allow people to use the temporary voters card, then obviously we will be undermining the integrity of the register that we have produced. Secondly, if you allow people to use the temporary voters’ card, then you cannot use the card reader because the card reader cannot read the temporary voters card. The card reader can only read the permanent voters card,” he explained.
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