The Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja has granted approval to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the governorship and state house of assembly elections.
Wednesday’s ruling was on the ground that the information on the BVAS machines will be uploaded into the back-end server which cannot be tampered with.
Recall that in an application, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi had sought an order from the court restraining INEC – the Ist respondent – from tampering with the information in the BVAS machines until due inspection is conducted and certified true copies (CTC) of them issued.
Obi and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Friday, secured leave of the court to have access to all the sensitive materials used by the INEC in the conduct of the election held on February 25. However, INEC filed an application to vary the orders of the court.
Counsel to the INEC, Tanimu Inuwa SAN, spoke on Tuesday while moving an application seeking to vary the orders of the court which gave permission to Obi and Atiku, to inspect all the sensitive materials used in the conduct of the presidential election held on February 25 said that “Each polling unit has its own particular BVAS machine which we need to configure for the forthcoming elections.”
“It will be very difficult for us, within the period, to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS for the election.
“We have already stated in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost as we will transfer all the data in the BVAS to our backend server. Our backend server preserves the data.
“So, granting this application will be a clog in the process and disrupt the conduct of the elections.”
In his argument, counsel for Obi, Dr Onyechi Ikpeazu, SAN prayed the court not to grant INEC’s application as granting it would mean losing the original information there.
”All we are seeking is for a physical inspection of the BVAS so that the evidence is obtained before it will be configured” he told the court.
He therefore, opposed INEC application and urged the court not to grant it.
Ruling on Obi and LP’s application, the court which also doubles as the presidential election petitions tribunal, said granting the sixth relief in the application would amount to “tying the hands of the respondent (INEC)”.