Former Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) National Commissioner, Mike Igini, has defended the right of political parties to establish situation rooms for monitoring and reporting election results, arguing that the practice promotes transparency in the electoral process.
Igini said political parties and candidates could receive results from their polling unit agents and transmit the figures to their own situation rooms for collation and publication.
He made the remarks during an interview on Trust TV, where he explained that election results displayed publicly at polling units could be reported by political parties, journalists and other members of the public.
“The issue now is that, does a candidate, a political party, have the right to set up a situational room and to publish that, to report that? Absolutely,” he said.
Explaining further, Igini said political parties had the right to transmit results obtained from their polling unit agents to their own situation rooms, noting that the practice was consistent with the purpose of making election results publicly accessible.
“A political party, a candidate that have received the results at the polling unit, have the right to send that result to its agent, to its own situational room,” he said.
The former commissioner explained that making polling unit results publicly available was intended to prevent discrepancies between figures recorded at polling units and those announced during subsequent stages of collation.
He cited Form EC60E, which displays polling unit results, as part of efforts introduced to improve transparency and make election results accessible to the public.
“When they get to the point of collation, they suddenly will lose election. That was why we went ahead to bring about what we call Form EC60E. The result of that polling unit must be pasted there,” Igini said.
He maintained that once polling unit results became public documents, political parties and the media had the right to communicate and report the information.
Igini referenced Section 39 of the Nigerian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression, including the right to receive and impart information.
He argued that the constitutional protection supported the publication of election results already made public, adding that political parties should not be prevented from operating their own result-monitoring centres.
“No law stop that. So the 18 candidates you have, they can have as many IReV as you have,” he said.
Igini also explained that the Independent National Electoral Commission’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV) was introduced to allow the public to view polling unit results and strengthen transparency during collation.
He said the availability of results for public scrutiny would make it more difficult to alter figures after they had been recorded at polling units.
The former commissioner further cited a 1983 court case involving the Nigerian Union of Journalists and the then Federal Electoral Commission, FEDECO, arguing that the judiciary had upheld the right of journalists to publish election results.
He also referred to Ghana’s 2024 general election, where, according to him, a political party used its own situation room to assess results and inform an opposing party that it had won before the outcome was subsequently affirmed by the country’s electoral authorities.
Igini warned against using secrecy as a reason to restrict public access to election information, insisting that transparency was necessary to build confidence in the electoral process.
“The core secrecy cannot be an answer to the call by Nigerians for openness and transparency,” he said.
His comments come amid discussions about the role of political parties in independently monitoring and reporting election results ahead of future elections in Nigeria.
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