THE ongoing voters’ registration entered its second day yesterday with a lot of people still complaining about the quality of the DDC Machines and inability to register. In some states, the exercise was yet to start while in others where it has taken off, prospective voters have continued to display anger, frustration, and disappointment over their inability to locate any registration centre or technical hitches arising from the inability of some INEC officials to effectively operate the Direct Data Capture Machines (DDCMs).
The Senate President David Mark and his wife, Helen, were among Nigerians affected by the technical fault in one of the machines deployed to his polling unit at the Old Government Reserved Area (GRA), Otukpo. Mark waited for almost one hour, but could not be registered due to technical challenges in the scanner attached to the DDC machine. After several unsuccessful attempts to capture his finger prints, the Registration Officer, Adeniji Musibau, pleaded with him to come back to register.
Even the former President in his Home town could not register, due to the fact that the DDC Machine Scanner was refusing his thumb Print, the INEC staff had to quickly deploy an IT specialist to that area, after the ex-president waited for close to an hour, he finally registered. But he made an appeal to the public stating that when a new technology is being introduced to the public, their are bound to be challenges and it will be much more easier to registration in a few days time.
As patriotic as i am, and fully understand that time is needed, but i feel their are major flaws in this registration process, for starters i don't think there was enough time given to really test the quality and efficiency of this machines on live subjects of a group of people, i do feel they could have test run it before the delta rerun, at least to find out where they need improvement, experts who have seen the machine, has also come out to say that the processing power of this machines are not up to standard, making the registration process longer, there are also a lot of glitches here and there concerning logistic problems, but hopefully am sure they will all be sorted out eventually.
On sighting this Machines, i taught it was an entirely new technology, only to discover that it was the same type of machines that were used during national identity card registration, and i wonder where are those machines, and why was a case study not really done to find out the fundamental flaws of that registration, and again MTN are also using this machines to register their SIM's, and subscribers don't spend more than 5 mins on one registration, why didn't they contract part of those experts that organised and deployed MTN's SIM registration, i feel our pride got in a way there.
I agree totally with OBJ that we should give them more time, that it will get better, but the truth is this, is there really enough time going by the statements of the National Assembly and INEC that they will not extend the registration process time period.

curled from www.voiceoutng.com