Appeal court says INEC can reconfigure BVAS but gives condition

The Court of Appeal in Abuja has approved a request by the Independent National Electoral Commission to reset the electronic devices it used to verify voters’ data during the presidential election, dismissing objections from opposition parties.

– Why this matters

The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) is emerging as key evidence in the challenge launched by the Labour Party and the Peoples Democratic Party against the results of the Feb. 25 election. The machines were used to confirm voters’ data and to upload results from each polling unit on INEC portal.

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Inec declared Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress winner, but the opposition parties and several voters have since rejected the outcome, alleging result manipulation and fraud.

The court earlier approved applications from the LP and PDP to be given access to the machines and all sensitive materials related to the polls, but Inec filed a counter request arguing that it needs to reset the devices for upcoming governorship elections on March 11. The commission postponed state polls after the court ruling on Wednesday.

Inec is deploying over 176,000 BVAS machines to voting points across the country for the next election. A lawyer for Peter Obi, candidate of the Labour Party, said the party wanted a physical inspection of the machines before they were reconfigured. Mr Obi attended the court session on Wednesday.

– Key points to note

A three-member panel of the appeal court led by Joseph Ikyegh ruled that Inec can reset the machines but must upload the data in them to a backend server and make certified true copies of the data to the opposition parties.

A lawyer representing Inec, Tanimu Inuwa, said agreed the commission would store the data on its server, according to the News Agency of Nigeria.

In an earlier filing, Inec’s deputy director for ICT, Lawrence Bayode, said “before the purging is approved by the BVAS devices, the data on the BVAS devices have to be uploaded to the accreditation backend server.”

The INEC IT expert further noted that “the accreditation data on the BVAS devices cannot be tampered with and/or lost during upload to the accreditation backend server.”