BVAS configuration will be completed Tuesday, says INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says the configuration of the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS) will be completed on Tuesday.

Over the past few days, there has been a controversy over the electoral body’s plan to reconfigure the BVAS machines ahead of the governorship and state assembly elections.

Major opposition parties protested the planned configuration over concerns that the process may tamper with the data of the presidential election.

Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), recently sought an order seeking to restrain INEC “from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until the due inspection is conducted and certified true copies (CTC) of them issued”.

Last Wednesday, the presidential election petition tribunal refused to restrain INEC from reconfiguring the machines.

Hours after the court verdict, the electoral commission postponed the governorship and state assembly elections by one week in order to have adequate time to reconfigure the BVAS.

Speaking on Sunday in an interview on Channels Television, Festus Okoye, INEC national commissioner, said no BVAS machine will be reconfigured without the data being uploaded to the “accreditation backend”.

The INEC spokesperson said the commission has learnt lessons on the challenges of the BVAS machines during the presidential elections.

“As at the last time I checked, over 170,000 of those results have been uploaded,” Okoye said.

“As you are aware, we are reconfiguring the BVAS for purposes of the governorship and state assembly elections, and any BVAS that was used for the presidential and national assembly elections that do not push to the accreditation backend, the data relating to the conduct of the presidential and national assembly elections will not be reconfigured.

“In fact, the BVAS will not allow itself to be reconfigured or reset if the entire data is not pushed to the accreditation backend.

“I’m sure that by Tuesday when we hope to complete the resettling of the BVAS for the purposes of the governorship and state assembly elections, the results in all the places where elections were conducted would have been pushed to the accreditation backend.”