Electoral Act: NASS bows, concurs with Buhari

The National Assembly has concurred with observations raised by President Muhammadu Buhari in the rejected third version of the 2018 Electoral Bill, and effected amendments on affected sections and deleted one.
President Buhari, had in his refusal of assent to the third version of the amendment bill, listed about 14 contentious areas that must be addressed by the federal lawmakers for the 2010 Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill 2018 to see the light of the day.
And accordingly, the President’s observations were addressed in the 4th version of the bill adopted by the joint committee of the National Assembly on the Independent and National Electoral Commission, yesterday.
The affected sections, as announced by the chairman of the joint committee, Senator Suleiman Nazif (PDP Bauchi North), are 9(1A), 9(B5), 18(1- 4), 19(4), 30(1), 31(1) and 31(7).
Others are 36(3), 44(3-4), 67(a-d), 87(2), 87(14) and 1124.
While Section 9(1A) deals with voters’ registers in electronic format and manual or hard copy format, Section 18(14) deals with process of replacement of voter card by the INEC on demand by voters, and that such must not be done less than 30 days before election.
Section 36(3) of the adopted bill makes provision for way out on sudden death of candidate of political party in the course of election, as it happened in 2016 Kogi gubernatorial election.
The section states: “If after the commencement of poll and before the announcement of the final result and declaration of a winner, the leading candidate dies, (a), the commission shall, being satisfied of the fact of the death, suspend the election for a period not exceeding 21 days.
“(b) The political party whose candidate died may, if it intends to continue to participate in the election, conduct a fresh primary within seven days of the death of its candidate and submit a new candidate to replace the dead candidate “(c) Subject to paragraphs (a) and (b) , the commission shall continue with the election, announce the final result and declare a winner.” The committee chairman, however, added that Section 34(2-4), which deals with added laws on commission of party logo on ballot papers, was deleted.
This, according to him, is because at no time was provision for usage of card reader deleted in any of the versions of the electoral bills.
According to him, the adopted 4th electoral bill is a harmonised version of the 2nd and 3rd one.
It would be recalled that the first version of the bill forwarded to President Buhari in February this year by the federal lawmakers, was rejected as a result of introduction of new sequence of election provided for in Section 25(1) of the bill.
The second version forwarded to the President in June after removal of the new sequence of elections provisions, was out rightly vetoed by the President who never considered it in any way before the bill got constitutionally expired on his table on the 26th of July, 2018.

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