There is an indication that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will postpone the much awaited Governorship elections, due to an order restraining it from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until the due inspection was conducted.
Daily Links reliably gathered that INEC requires sufficient time to reconfigure the BVAS needed to conduct the election that would take place in all 36 states of the federation.
The medium had reported that, a Court of Appeal in Abuja last Friday granted leave to the presidential candidates of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) counterpart, Atiku Abubakar, to gain access to all the sensitive materials used by INEC for the conduct of the Feb. 25 presidential election.
The applicants urged the court to compel INEC to allow them to obtain documents it used for the presidential election to aid their petitions against the outcome of the presidential election.
“An order granting the applicants’ permission to do electronic scanning and make photocopies of voter’s registration, ballot papers used in the conduct of the election for the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria held on the Feb. 25.
“An order granting leave to the applicants to carry out Digital Forensic Inspection of BVAS machines used for the conduct of the Feb. 25 election for the Office of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”
The plaintiffs sought an order restraining INEC from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until the due inspection was conducted and Certified True Copies of them issued.
INEC sourc said the electoral umpire needed to reconfigure the BVAS used for the February 25 Presidential elections and deploy them to polling units for Saturday’s gubernatorial election
According to the source, “INEC is planning to approach the Appeal Court on Monday, 6th March 2023, to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the March 11 state elections.
“This became necessary due to an order restraining INEC from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until the due inspection was conducted.
“The commission’s Legal Department is actually preparing an application to be filled in the court on Monday to seek an order for it to reconfigure its BVAS for Saturday Governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections.”
The source added that INEC technical team have to be deployed on time to commence the re-configuration of the device which has to be done one by one.
“The order was important if the Saturday Governorship and state Houses of Assembly election must hold as scheduled, otherwise the postponement of the election became inevitable.”