Yiaga Africa, a civil society organisation, has pledged to promote the integrity of the 2023 elections through its ‘Parallel Vote Tabulation’ (PVT).

Its executive director, Samson Itodo, said this at the Yiaga Africa Watching The Vote (WTV) Media Roundtable on the 2023 Presidential Election and Deployment of PVT in Abuja on Thursday.

Mr Itodo said the aim of the round table was for Yiaga Africa to reel out its election intervention and keep journalists abreast with its programmes.

The PVT was an election-day observation methodology that leveraged statistics and technology to observe the voting process to count and tally the results.

The process involved the deployment of citizen observers to randomly sampled polling units to collect data on the conduct of the elections and official polling units’ results.

Mr Itodo said with the results assembled from the sampled polling units, a citizen observer group could release projected estimates and verify the accuracy of results declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

He explained that PVT allowed Yiaga Africa WTV to present an accurate and comprehensive assessment of the election day processes, adding that Yiaga Africa will deploy 3014 statutory and 774 LGAs and 48 mobile citizen observers to a representative random sample of 1507 polling units across the 36 states and the FCT.

“For us at Yiaga Africa, when we think about the upcoming 2023 general elections, there are a few things that actually come to mind because our vision is a people-driven, democratic and developed Africa. We see that there is a decline in the level of public participation, not just in elections but in governance,” stated Mr Itodo.

However, he stressed the need to protect the integrity of elections because “people don’t show up at elections is a lack of trust and faith” in the electoral process.

“So we have seen, based on our work and engagement, that there is a need to protect election integrity because if we protect election integrity, people will believe that their vote will count in elections,” added Mr Itodo.

Mr Itodo said the first objective would be to provide citizens with a repository of accurate, simplified and concise information on the electoral process to improve turnout.

(NAN)