By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Nigeria’s electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has urged the presidential election petition tribunal to grant permission allowing the commission to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) used in the conduct of the Feb. 25 National Assembly and Presidential polls.
The commission said this is to enable it conduct the March 11 governorship elections in 28 out of the 36 states of the country, saying the conduct of the election may be hampered without the reconfiguration.
INEC had declared Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) winner of the Feb. 25 presidential election after he polled 8.8 million votes to defeat Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party.
The opposition parties have however alleged malpractices, urging the court to grant them access to inspect the electoral materials including the BVAS, an application the court granted last week Friday.
A reliable source told our correspondent that the INEC is also asking the court to set aside the permission granted to opposition parties to inspect the electoral materials so that it could tamper with the machines to conduct governorship elections across 28 states on Saturday.
“The commission’s Legal Department is actually preparing an application to be filled in the court on Monday (yesterday) to seek an order for it to reconfigure its BVAS for Saturday Governorship and State Houses of Assembly election,” News Agency of Nigeria quoted a source in INEC as saying.
The source explained that considering the number of BVAS required to conduct the election across states, INEC needed to reconfigure the BVAS used for the 25 February elections and deploy them to polling units for the Saturday election.
The INEC technical team had to be deployed on time to commence the re-configuration of the device which they said would be done one by one, the source stated.
The Saturday’s governorship and state Houses of Assembly elections may likely be shifted if the permission for reconfiguration is not granted, our correspondent gathered.
A panel of the Tribunal led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh while granting the two separate ex parte applications by the two aggrieved presidential candidates filed alongside their political parties also granted “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.”
Additionally, the plaintiffs also 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”.
