Court Grants INEC’s Request To Reconfigure BVAS

The Court of Appeal, 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. 

In an application, the Labour Party (LP) and its 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 the due inspection is conducted and certified true copies (CTC) of them issued.

But on Wednesday, a three-member panel of the court of appeal led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh granted INEC’s request to reconfigure the BVAS machines for this week’s elections on the ground that the information on them will be uploaded into the back-end server which cannot be tampered with.

The panel argued that restraining the electoral umpire from reconfiguring BVAS will affect the conduct of the guber and assembly polls.

The appeal court, however, mandated INEC to allow the applicants to inspect and carry out a digital forensic examination of the electoral materials used to conduct the polls and also avail them of the certified true copy of the result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.

The court also granted the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate Bola Tinubu’s request to inspect election materials for the February 25th exercise.