The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has been given permission to modify the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, it utilised for the presidential election, by the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, which was in session at the Court of Appeal in Abuja on Wednesday, March 08, 2023.
A three-judge panel of the court ruled unanimously that preventing the electoral authority from reconfiguring the BVAS would have a negative impact on Saturday’s elections for governor and state parliament.
It disregarded the concerns of the Labour Party, LP, and Mr. Peter Obi, the party’s presidential candidate, had about INEC’s decision to reorganise all of the BVAS.
The court stated that granting Obi and his party’s objections would “tie the respondent, INEC’s hands.”
Moreover, it mentioned that INEC had stated in an affidavit it submitted to the court that the accreditation data included in the BVAS would be kept and easily retrievable from its authorised back-end server, guaranteeing that they could not be altered or destroyed.
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It further pointed out that neither Obi nor LP had refuted the statements made in INEC’s affidavit, highlighting the fact that the applicants had effectively admitted the statements as they had not been refuted.
The court directed INEC to provide the petitioners with the Certified True Copy, CTC, of the outcomes of the physical inspection of the BVAS, as well as to grant them access to examine and undertake digital forensic analysis of all electoral materials used in the conduct of the elections.
The Justice Joseph Ikyegh-led panel criticised Obi and LP for repeating their request to be permitted to scan and make copies of the electoral materials in INEC’s possession. Noting that the request had previously been granted, the panel determined that doing so constituted an abuse of the legal system.
You may recall that INEC had demanded that the BVAS needed to be reconfigured since they will be used in the upcoming round of elections.
It argued that it would be challenging to go on without a swift modification of the order the court previously granted to Obi and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar, particularly the part prohibiting it from interfering with anything included in the BVAS.
Obi and his party asked for permission to physically check all of the BVAS that were used for the presidential election in their application, which was stamped CA/PEC/09m/23.
With a group of attorneys lead by Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu, SAN, the petitioners claimed that the main goal of the application was to allow them to access data that was encoded in the BVAS and “reflect the real findings from Polling Units.”
They requested “permission to conduct out digital forensic and physical examination of BVAS, etc.,” as well as “to get the Certified True Copy, CTC, of all the data in the BVAS,” in their application.
INEC informed the court that a total of 176,000 BVAS were deployed to polling places during the presidential election while opposing the plea.
“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”.
“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 back-end server. We need the BVAS configured. So, granting this application will be a cog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections,” INEC’s lead lawyer, Tanimu Inuwa (SAN), pleaded.
