The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has received approval from the Court of Appeal, Abuja to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the upcoming governorship and state house of assembly elections.
The Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, had requested the court to issue an order preventing INEC from tampering with BVAS machine information until the due inspection was conducted and certified true copies (CTC) were issued.
However, on Wednesday, a three-member panel of the court, led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh, granted INEC’s request to reconfigure the BVAS machines for the current week’s elections on the basis that the information on them would be uploaded into the back-end server, which cannot be tampered with. The panel contended that restraining the electoral umpire from reconfiguring BVAS would affect the conduct of the gubernatorial and assembly polls.
Nevertheless, the appeal court ordered INEC to permit the applicants to inspect and carry out a digital forensic examination of the electoral materials used to conduct the polls, and to also make available to them the certified true copy of the result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.
The court also approved the request of Bola Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, to inspect election materials for the February 25th exercise.