INEC to seek court permission to reconfigure BVAS ahead of gov poll

Ahead of the governorship election on March 11, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says it will on Monday approach the Appeal Court for an order to allow it reconfigure its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).

The electoral umpire’s move followed a court order restraining it from tampering with the information in the BVAS machines until they are inspected and Certified True Copies of them are issued.

A source in INEC said that the commission would require sufficient time to reconfigure the BVAS needed to conduct the elections that would take place in all the 36 states of the federation except the FCT.

“The commission’s Legal Department is actually preparing an application to be filled in the court on Monday to seek an order for it to reconfigure its BVAS for Saturday Governorship and State Houses of Assembly election,” the source said.

The source, who did not want to be named over non-authorisation to speak on the matter, explained that considering the number of BVAS required to conduct the election across states, INEC needed to reconfigure the BVAS used for the March 25 elections and deploy them to polling units for the Saturday election.

The source added that INEC’s technical team have to be deployed on time to commence the re-configuration of the device which has to be done one by one.

The source said the order was important if the Saturday Governorship and state Houses of Assembly election must hold as scheduled, otherwise the election will be postponed.

The Court of Appeal in Abuja on Friday granted leave to the presidential candidates of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) counterpart, Atiku Abubakar, to have access to all the sensitive materials used by INEC for the conduct of the Feb. 25 presidential election.