Cross River LG Elections: Commission Distributes Sensitive Materials

The Cross River State Independent Electoral Commission, CROSIEC has commenced the distribution of sensitive election materials ahead of the local government election slated for Saturday, November 2, 2024.

The Chairman of the commission, Dr. Ekong Boco was observed allocating the sensitive materials for onward movement to CROSIEC offices across the 18 council areas.

Dr. Boco, who welcomed representatives of political parties led by the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) and security operatives for the process, further disclosed that more than ten thousand ad hoc staff have also been deployed for the exercise.

Boco explained “We have more than 10,000 ad hoc staff deployed to all the polling units. These include 9,843 polling officers, 460 supervisors, 18 returning officers and 198 collation officers.”

According to him, “We will be using 3,281 Polling Units as approved by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The voters register we are using for this election is from INEC. We are conducting this election in line with the electoral law.”

Continuing, Dr. Boco said, “The ad-hoc staff have all been trained. We trained some between October 25 to 27 and a few days ago, we concluded the last of the training sessions. So, we are prepared to conduct a free, fair transparent exercise in Cross River State. It is my expectation that the training received would be brought to bear.”

Manual process

The CROSIEC Chairman also announced that 10 political parties would be participating in the local government election and has been clearly identified on the ballot papers.

He stated further, “On November 2nd, voting would commence at 8 a.m. and is expected to end by 2 p.m. However, when at the close of the exercise, only those on the queue will be allowed to cast their votes.

“For this election, we are not deploying BVAS (Biomodal Voter Accreditation System) because the commission does not have the machine. So, election process would be manual. It is manual accreditation and voting, which will go on simultaneously,” he reiterated.

Also speaking, the state chairman of the Inter party Advisory Council (IPAC), Mr. Effiom Edet of the All Peoples Party (APP) expressed satisfaction with CROSIEC’s distribution process and expressed confidence that the election would be free, fair and credible.

Public holiday

Meanwhile, the governor of Cross River State, Senator Bassey Otu has declared Thursday October 30 and Friday 31, 2024 as public holiday to enable eligible voters and other citizens participate in Saturday’s council election.

A statement signed by the Chief Press Secretary to the Cross River State governor, Mr. Nsa Gill indicated, “The decision was aimed at providing residents with ample time to travel to their respective local government areas to participate in the elections.”

The statement further exempted banks and other financial institutions from observance of the public holiday.

Emmanuel Ukoh