The governorship candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance in the Anambra State governorship election, Prof Charles Soludo, has alleged that the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System machines in his opponents’ wards are working smoothly, while those deployed to his stronghold are ‘epileptic’.

Soludo made this statement as he addressed newsmen at his ward, at Isuofia Ward 13. The former Central Bank governor stated that he made calls to his agents who gave him the information that elections were going smoothly at the wards of his opponents.

He said, “I understand that in some places it actually went very well, there were no glitches but I am a little bit curious because I was calling to find out what is happening in other places. If you are running to become the governor and you have this kind of situation, you will be interested to know what is going on in your opponent’s ward and catchment areas.

“I’m a little bit curious the machine seemed to have worked in some places including Ogah, so to speak. The reports that I have got from my people states that voting seems to have gone seamlessly in most of the polling booths there. They have even counted the votes because they have finished voting in the polling booths and the results are already known. But here, we are still struggling but you can see the resilience of the people. Since 7:30 am, they have been here in their hundreds but they cannot vote; but they insist that they must vote because they want their votes to count.”

Soludo added, “If you have over 700 people here and you have only one person doing the accreditation with one machine that is epileptic, a machine that packs up when you accredit one or two people; I would have said, were we being targeted if I did not get reports from around the state.”

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The governorship candidate further advised the Independent National Electoral Commission to train its staff in using the BIVAS machine in order to forestall such occurrences.

He said “INEC needs to train and re-train the people that operate these machines because you do not need to have this kind of problem. If it stops working, before you call for technical assistance, it can take about an hour. When the guy comes, fiddles with it, it might accredit another five voters and it goes bad again then you have to wait for another hour for somebody else to come but if those who operate it have all the technical skills, that will be helpful.”