New Elections Technology and Approach to Electoral Violence: Looking Forward to the Forthcoming Ekiti and Osun States Elections

The recently developed Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) has prompted election riggers to evolve a new pattern of electoral violence to circumvent the effectiveness of the BVAS. The machine and its operators are captured and forced to vote and prepare results for the political interests represented by the captors. Two imminent elections to watch and prepare for these emerging patterns of violence include Ekiti and Osun states. The two states do not have a fair page on electoral violence and malpractices. The bye-election for Ekiti East constituency 1 that would have been held in March 2022 was suspended as three persons were killed in electoral violence during the exercise. Also, there were reports of bloody violence in Osun state during the 2018 gubernatorial election. These incidences of violence were efforts to create an atmosphere of fear by political thugs to gain an advantage over other contestants in the election.

As the technology of elections improves, the patterns of electoral violence also continue to change. Accordingly, there are good grounds to fear that media reports of what happened in Imo state in her recent 2022 election at Ngor Okpala constituency are capable of playing out in these two states if measures to prevent them are not considered expeditiously and embedded in the election management system besides adequate security preparations. Thus, this edition of Nextier SPD Policy Weekly reflects the evolving technologies of election management and the possible hindrances based on the few instances in which they have been tried.

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