ICT coy introduces election monitoring App to stem rigging

 
An indigenous ICT firm, Hephzibah Integrated Technologies Ltd, has unveiled an application that it says can monitor the 2019 general elections in the 120,000 polling units across the country.
 
The firm said the application would do this in accordance with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) guidelines, eliminate irregularities and rigging during and after the voting process.
 
The firm’s Managing Director/CEO, Engr. Clement Obomighe, said in Kaduna that the App, which works with all android or IOS phones, could also transmit information and data to a central server as they are happening from across the country.
He noted that in places where there was internet challenge it could record, store and send automatically as soon as internet became available.   
He said that they set up a system that helps to generate report format, “reports produced by observers or party agents can be substantiated with evidence which can serve as forensic evidence in courts.
 
“Different accurate statistical facts can be gotten from a simple query of data base. Party agents or observers’ presence and efforts can be monitored as the app is geo-locationally locked and cannot be used in another polling unit.
 
“The degree of freeness and fairness of the election can be determined as the app works according to INEC guidelines and where the guideline is not followed or there are irregularities the app will show.
 
“Also in the transmission of results, where there are differences between the results declared in the polling units and that of the ward or other level an alert will be sent showing the disparity. The app has two interfaces; mobile interface and administrative interface,” he said.
Speaking on why INEC has not adopted their technology, he said, “we went to INEC and told them to use the App, to authenticate it and they said they couldn’t because they don’t know if we are sponsored by a political party.
                    
“Our App is not to spite INEC. We developed it to solve some challenges in our electoral system. We have signed agreement with cloud storage which increases, we have paid upfront for that, we will be monitoring the data, if we notice any increase, we will increase database size.”