By John Ikani
The Court of Appeal’s Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) in Abuja has given the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) the go-ahead to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) it used for the presidential election.
Peter Obi of the Labour Party had sought permission to conduct a physical inspection of all the BVAS used in the presidential poll to enable them to extract data embedded in the BVAS, which represents the actual results from polling units.
While opposing the application, INEC told the court that there were a total of 176,000 BVAS that were deployed to polling units during the presidential election, and that granting the application would be a cog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections.
INEC 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, restraining it from tampering with formation contained in the BVAS, it would be difficult for it to proceed with the scheduled elections.
INEC had earlier filed an affidavit with the court, assuring that the accreditation data contained in the BVAS could not be tampered with or lost and would be stored and easily retrieved from its accredited back-end server.
The Court agreed with INEC that information on accreditation contained in the BVAS devices had been uploaded into its back up server and could be accessed at any time.
The Appellate Court predicated its agreement with INEC on the ground that all averments in the counter affidavit of the Electoral body were not challenged.
The Court said that granting the request of Obi and the Labour Party would tie down the hand of INEC in the conduct of the Saturday’s gubernatorial election.
The Court further held that the claims of INEC that information on the BVAS devices cannot be tampered with during uploading was not attacked by Obi and as such, deemed authentic.
