The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that it is already making plans for a second presidential election in 2023 in case the election on February 25, 2023, does not produce a clear winner.
The agency in charge of voting has made plans to print twice as many ballots as needed for the first vote.
Festus Okoye, INEC’s Chairman of the Information and Voter Education Committee, said this at a Friday roundtable meeting with media bureau chiefs in Abuja. He said that the commission had to do this because it might not have time to print ballots right after the first election so they could be ready for the next election.
He said, “This is because the law gives the commission just 21 days within which to engage in reverse logistics and conduct a run-off election in case there’s no winner.”
He also said that, for the governorship election, INEC had made plans to print twice as many ballots for at least four run-off states in case none of the states had a clear winner in the first election.
He said that the law says that to win the presidential election, a candidate must get the most votes and a quarter of the votes in two-thirds of the states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
He said that not all candidates would run in the second election if the first one didn’t have a clear winner.
There will be 18 candidates in the first election, but in the second election, there will only be two.
He said that the two candidates would be the ones who got the most votes in the election, and the second candidate would get the most votes in the most states.
