From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has summoned the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and 16 other political parties over electoral materials.
National Commissioner and Chairman Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, made the disclosure in a telephone chat with Daily Sun in Abuja, yesterday.
He said the summon was in line with the statutory requirement for the political parties to inspect and authenticate the representation of their logos and acronyms in the samples of the ballot papers and result sheets ahead of every election.
He explained that the exercise became necessary to avert past experience where inconsequential political parties instituted legal actions against INEC, resulting in the cancellation of credibly conduct elections.
“The materials include the ballot papers and result sheets for them to confirm that what appeared on the samples of the electoral materials we are going to use are the logos and acronyms of their parties. It has become necessary so that by the end of the day, the political parties will not deny and hold the commission liable for misrepresentation of their logos and acronyms.
“The law wants to avoid a situation where the parties will begin to claim that the cow or sheep on their logo has five legs instead of three legs we used in the sample.”
In the past, some useless political parties have used that excuse to nullify a whole credible election. Therefore, the law is trying to prevent such occurrences of error of exclusion or misrepresentation. That is what we did with the leaders of the political parties. Like I explained, we showed them the sample of the ballot papers and the result sheets we are going to use, they confirm the logos and acronyms of their parties and whether what we have done in the samples we show them represents the logos of their parties.
“More importantly, they did that in writing. So, after checking and confirming everything, they will give us paper where they attested that the logos and acronyms represent that of theirs parties.”