Yiaga Africa To Deploy Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) for Osun Guber election

Yiaga Africa, a civic non governmental organization promoting democracy, good governance and development in Africa has said that it would deploy the Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) method to monitor the July 16 Governorship Election in Osun state.

This was disclosed by Mr Ezenwa Nwagwu, board member, Yiaga Africa, on Thursday, at a roundtable discussion organized for print and broadcast media practitioners in Osogbo on the forthcoming election.

Nwagwu said the PVT is an advanced election day observation methodology that uses statistics and technology to monitor the process of voting, counting and tallying of results.

He said the PVT would allow Yiaga Africa’s Watching The Vote (WTV) platform to present accurate and comprehensive assessment of the processes of the election.

The assessment would be in terms of election officers compliance with electoral guidelines, presence of security agents, disposition of party agents, secrecy of the ballot and transparency of the counting process.

Nwagwu added that PVT is a comprehensive observation of the electoral process, particularly the pre-election environment, election day and post-election activities.

Deploying observers

Also speaking, the Election Programme Manager at Yiaga Africa, Mr Paul James, said Watching The Vote (WTV) would deploy 562 observers on election day, armed with a structured observation checklist and a critical incident form.

He explained that the observers would report on opening of polling units, accreditation and voting, counting and announcement of results, using their mobile phones to send coded text messages to Yiaga’s WTV Data Centre in Osogbo.

He also said that the observers would work based on statistical sampling of polling units and would send in official results as announced by the election officials to the WTV Data Centre.

James said further that an additional 30 observers would be deployed to oversee result collation at LGA Result Collation Centres and another lone observer would cover the State Results Collation Centre.

The Election Programme Manager noted that the PVT methodology was first developed in 1986 by citizen observers in the Philippines and has been used in 52 countries across Africa.

Emmanuel Ukoh