Appeal Court grants INEC permission to reconfigure BVAS machines

The Independent National Electoral Commission INEC has been given permission by the Court of Appeal in Lagos to modify the Bimordal Voters Accreditation System BVAS for the Saturday, March 11 gubernatorial and state houses of assembly elections.

Since the same equipment will be used for the governorship elections as well as the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25, 2023, INEC had requested permission from the court to modify the voting devices. The Labour party, which is appealing the results of the presidential and national assembly elections, as well as its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, objected to this, though. In an application marked: CA/PEC/09m/23, Obi and the Labour party had asked permission from the court to be able to perform a physical inspection of all the BVAS that were used for the presidential poll.

The purpose of the application, according to Obi and his party, was to allow them to retrieve data from the BVAS that "reflect the actual results from Polling Stations." They requested "permission to conduct out digital forensic and physical inspection of BVAS, etc.," as well as "to obtain the Certified True Copy, CTC, of all the data in the BVAS," in their application.

A three-judge panel led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh ruled unanimously this evening, March 8, that preventing the electoral board from altering the BVAS would have a negative impact on Saturday's governorship and state assembly elections. It ignored the concerns the Labour Party, LP, and Peter Obi, the party's presidential candidate, had with INEC's decision to reorganize all of the BVAS.

The court stated that granting Obi and his party's objections would "tie the respondent, INEC's hands."

The court noted that the accreditation data in the BVAS would be saved and easily retrievable from its accredited back-end server, which means that they could not be tampered with or deleted, according to an affidavit filed by INEC.