The ongoing reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines (BVAS) used during the presidential and National Assembly elections on 25 February will end on Monday, The PUNCH has learnt.
The Independent National Electoral Commission had postponed the governorship and state Houses of Assembly elections scheduled to hold on March 11 to March 18 in order to be able to reconfigure the BVAS.
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Consequently, all activities pertaining to the polls were rescheduled, including inspection of sensitive materials at the Central Bank of Nigeria by the political parties.
INEC took the decision at its management meeting, which was convened on Wednesday after the Court of Appeal gave it the go-ahead to reconfigure the BVAS machines.
The commission said it could not go ahead with the governorship poll as earlier scheduled because it needed time to reconfigure the BVAS machines, which were used for the presidential election on February 25.
The Court of Appeal had dismissed an application by Labour Party challenging the reconfiguration of the BVAS used for the presidential poll, whose outcome LP had rejected.
The appellate court panel held that allowing the objections of the Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, would amount to “tying the hands of the respondent (INEC).”
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Festus Okoye, a National Commissioner with Nigeria’s electoral body, said no political party will be allowed to look into the brain of the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems used for voter accreditation and electronic transmission of votes.
The Commission also said the reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) would be completed by Tuesday in preparation for the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections.
Okoye said;
As you are aware, we are reconfiguring the BVAS for purposes of the governorship and state assembly elections, and any BVAS that was used for the presidential and National Assembly elections that do not push to the accreditation backend, the data relating to the conduct of the presidential and National Assembly elections will not be reconfigured.
In fact, the BVAS will not allow itself to be reconfigured or reset if the entire data is not pushed to the accreditation backend.
I’m sure that by Tuesday when we hope to complete the resettling of the BVAS for the purposes of the governorship and state assembly elections, the results in all the places where elections were conducted would have been pushed to the accreditation backend.
