TheCable

The Transition Monitoring Group (TMG), a civil society organisation (CSO), says there were cases of “vote-buying” in all the LGAs of Ekiti during the just-concluded governorship election.

The Ekiti governorship election was held over the weekend and Biodun Oyebanji of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was declared winner of the exercise.

There were incidents of vote-buying during the election, but speaking with state house correspondents on Monday, Oyebanji said as far as he is concerned, his party did not buy votes.

Auwal Rafsanjani, TMG chairman, in a statement on Tuesday, condemned the “vote-buying” that took place during the exercise, and also asked the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to improve on the deployment of the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS).

“Vote-buying was observed across the 16 local government areas of the state with political parties bidding for the votes of electorates,” the statement reads.

“The ability of Ekiti politicians to make light of such a grave violation of extant law is most unfortunate.

“Transformation Monitoring Group condemns this blatant violation of the electoral law.

“Reports from field observers indicate that it takes at least 3 minutes to accredit a voter using the BVAS in 41% of the locations observed. Going by this, the BVAS would have successfully accredited 20 voters per hour on the average in the affected voting locations.”

The group also called on INEC to improve on the accreditation time for voters, adding that it should take not up to a minute per voter for seamless electoral process.