Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, has urged the National Assembly to empower the electoral umpire to determine and deploy appropriate technology in future elections.

He made the appeal at a parley of the Senate and House of Representatives Conference Committee on the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2021, yesterday, in Abuja.

While charging the lawmakers to prioritise passage of the amended law, the INEC boss suggested: “One way of doing so is to make broad provisions of the law that will empower the commission to continue to innovate without restricting us to a specific technology such as the Smart Card Reader, which could in due course become obsolete, inapplicable or irrelevant as is already the case following the recent introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) by the commission.”