… As Court Grants Approval to Reconfigure BVAS
By Emmanuel Sunday
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has postponed the governorship and state House of Assembly elections scheduled to hold on March 11 by one week.
The elections will now hold on March 18, 2023.
The decision was reached after a meeting the INEC chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu held with his team.
The postponement is coming about three days before the March 11 date earlier scheduled for the state elections.
Consequently, all activities pertaining to the exercise are rescheduled, especially the state inspection of sensitive materials at the Central Bank of Nigeria.
A statement said INEC’s decision was due to the commission’s inability to earnestly commence reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines utilised during the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections to enable their use in the state elections.
This is as the Court of Appeal sitting in 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.
Wednesday’s ruling was on the ground that the information on the BVAS machines will be uploaded into the back-end server which cannot be tampered with.
In an application, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi had sought an order from the court restraining INEC, the 1st respondent, from tampering with the information on the BVAS machines until due inspection is conducted and certified true copies (CTC) of them issued.