'Lai Olurode and MK Hammanga electorates as well the other stakeholders. This situation is as a result of: i) The must-win-at all-cost attitude of the Nigerian politicians ii) Lack of trust among stakeholders iii) The winner takes all political system practised IV) Poor performance of our elected political leaders etc. In countries of the northern hemisphere, elections are a routine and do not entail restrictions on movements or visible presence of fierce looking armed security personnel who could serve the purpose of either checkmating election fraudsters and hoodlums or subverting the electoral process through collusion. In most of Africa, deployment of security personnel on election duties is an outcome of an inter-play of several political and social factors. This is expectedly so, because whenever human beings are involved, interests and conflict come into play. The next section focuses on key factors in deployment. However, theoretical plans about deployment often vary from the practice of deployment. 5.3 Factors in Deployment Theoretically deployment of security personnel in election is not to be done arbitrarily. It must be guided by some logic since ultimately its objective is to ensure that elections are secured so that preference aggregation cannot be vitiated. We can 70 ELECTION SECURITY IN NIGERIA: MATTERS ARISING Deployment of Security Personnel in Elections: Challenges and Lessons from the Field delineate two broad set of factors in deployment. These are objective and subjective factors. In discussions with police officers with field experiences in election security, the most frequently mentioned objective factor in the deployment of security personnel is volatility of the area and thus the issue of flash points. This shows that special consideration is ordinarily given to terrains that are vulnerable to security breaches and where outbreak of violence is an immediate possibility. This vulnerability is usually derived from hard data in official statistics about criminal incidents in any divisional police area. Typically, a divisional police officer must be able to determine, from records, threat levels in the division generally and in specific locations in particular. This logic is driven by a criminal social theory that draws a strong relationship between area/location and crime. This factor weighs heavily in allocating scarce security resources to attain maximal output. Some of the other objective factors include the size of the voting population in each polling unit, the number of polling units and their distances. Security personnel in faraway polling units should be deployed much earlier than those in nearby ones. Some polling units have what is referred to as voting points. These are additional points created out of large polling units with some having as much as close to 3,000 voters on the register to ease accreditation and actual voting. Security personnel to be deployed to such areas should be conversant with crowd control management. Ideally, the size of security personnel should be known ahead of the Election Day and ELECTION SECURITY IN NIGERIA: MATTERS ARISING 71