Court okays INEC’s request to reconfigure BVAS

Preparatory for Saturday’s governorship and House of Assembly elections, the Presidential Election Petition Court, (PEPC), has passed a unanimous judgement giving approval for the Independent National Electoral Commission to reconfigure its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, (BVAS), .

The three-man panel of justices headed by Justice Joseph Ikyegh averred that opposing INEC’s request to reconfigure its BVAS would be devastating to the conduct of March 11 polls.
After the explanation by the Court sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja, on Wednesday, the panel gave the Independent National its nod and dismissed objections raised by the Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi against reconfiguring the BVAS.

The Court said they cannot allow the hands of the electoral umpire to be tied given the critical exercise of conducting elections that is part of their mandate.

“Allowing the objections by Obi and his party, would amount to tying the hands of the respondent, INEC.”
Earlier, INEC in the affidavit submitted to the Tribunal assured the panel that the accreditation data contained in the BVAS could not be tampered with or lost, as they would be stored and easily retrieved from its accredited back-end server.

It further observed that neither Obi nor LP controverted the depositions in INEC’s affidavit, stressing that since such averments were not challenged, it amounted to admission by the applicants.

Meanwhile, the Court ordered INEC to ensure that applicants are allowed to inspect election materials and carry out digital forensic examination as well as to avail them the Certified True Copy, CTC, of result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.

The panel faulted Obi and LP for repeating their request to be allowed to scan and make copies of the electoral materials in INEC’s possession which they said had been earlier granted.

It maintained that without a prompt variation of the order the court earlier granted to Obi and the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, especially the aspect restraining it from tampering with formation contained in the BVAS, it would be difficult for it to proceed with the scheduled elections.
Obi and his party had in their application marked: CA/PEC/09m/23, sought permission to be allowed to conduct physical inspection of all the BVAS that were used for the presidential poll.

The applicants, through their team of lawyers led by Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu, SAN, said the essence of the application was to enable them to extract data embedded in the BVAS, “which represent the actual results from Polling Units.”
They specifically applied for; “leave to carryout digital forensic and physical inspection of BVAS, etc”, as well as to obtain the Certified True Copy, CTC, of all the data in the BVAS.”