[ODUNEWS] January 17 –INEC Chairman Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, addressing on Tuesday at the Chatham House in London, praised the commission’s in-house engineers for the creation of the BVAS and for always coming up with novel ideas and designs to improve the election process.According to him, a commission engineer offered using body odour to authenticate voters, but he had to ask them to wait.
Yakubu said, “The cleaning up of the register was painstakingly conducted by the commission because of the Automated Biometric Identification System, or ABIS. Before now, the commission used the AFIS, the fingerprint identification system, but this time around, we used the ABIS, meaning both fingerprint and facial, and that is also what we are using to accredit voters on election day.
“All these innovations were all the work of INEC’s own in-house engineers in the commission. The machines may have been fabricated outside the country, but the design of the machines was done by our own engineers in-house.
“In fact, one of them said they were going to introduce a new biometric using body odour.” I said, “Please, not yet. Let’s make haste slowly. But when he explained it to me, it sounded logical. He said, “Don’t laugh, chairman, because I said body odour is also biometric. He said, “How does your dog recognise you? It is from your body odour, and that is why if another person walks into the house, it barks; when you move into the house, it wags its tail because it recognises your body odour. I said, “But for the elections, let’s wait, not now.”
