INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, who spoke when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Finance to defend the commission’s 2017 budget, said until the Constitution was amended and necessary logistics put in place, the commission cannot delve into electronic and diaspora voting.
According to him, asides from the fact that electronic and diaspora voting lack constitutional backing, it’s also expensive to execute.
Yakubu further said for the past three years, INEC’s annual budget had stood at N45 billion, adding that the commission was yet to know how much the 2019 general election would gulp.
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He said INEC’s purse had been deeply drained following “unscheduled elections” in the last one year caused mainly by deaths of 13 national and state assembly members.
He said: “For instance, in the last one year, we have conducted 13 unscheduled by-elections caused by deaths of some members of national and state assembly, meaning that on the average, a member of the national or state assembly dies every month.”