Those who steal the Direct Data Capturing (DDC) machines before or during the voters' registration exercise are wasting their time because they do not stand a chance of influencing the outcome of the 2011 elections.

Chairman of Zinox Technologies Limited, Chief Leo Stan Ekeh, said this in a statement issued by the company yesterday. He said the stolen machines would be useless to the thieves because the raw data being collected by the DDC machines would still be merged by servers in the custody of INEC.

He said these servers would dictate and nullify multiple registrations, unaccounted registrations (from stolen machines) and other manipulations. According to the statement, the Chairman of Zinox Technologies Limited, the Nigerian company that supplied 80,000 pieces of the DDC machines, made these revelation while answering questions on the voters' registration on AIT's Kaakaki.

Chief Ekeh said that the delays experienced at the registration centres were not caused by the hardware but by the software. "The scanners, for example were calibrated by INEC to achieve a high resolution of the finger prints and this led to initial delays that INEC has swiftly rectified", he said.

The Zinox boss praised INEC for being passionate about producing a credible voters' register for the country.