By Ogochukwu Isioma
The Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja, on Wednesday, granted permission to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to reconfigure its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the conduct of the forthcoming March 11 Governorship and State House of Assemblies elections.
metrowatchxtra.com reports that Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Mr. Peter Obi, had approached the court for permission to conduct a physical inspection of all the BVAS machines that were deployed by INEC for the February 25, 2023 presidential election — a request the court granted.
However, INEC would later approach the court to set the ruling aside and allow it to immediately reconfigure the BVAS machines, arguing that reconfiguration of the BVAS was necessary since they would be deployed for the next round of elections.
The court, in a unanimous decision by a three-man panel of justices led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh, granted INEC’s request as sought; noting that stopping the electoral body from reconfiguring the BVAS would adversely affect Saturday’s governorship and state assemblies elections.
It dismissed objections that the LP and Peter Obi raised against INEC’s move to reconfigure all the BVAS, noting that INEC had in an affidavit it filed before the court, assured that the accreditation data contained in the BVAS could not be tampered with or lost, as they would be stored and easily retrieved from its accredited back-end server.
According to the appeal court, neither Mr. Obi nor LP controverted the depositions in INEC’s affidavit, stressing that since such averments were not challenged, it amounted to admission by the applicants.
Nevertheless, the court ordered INEC to allow the applicants to inspect and carry out digital forensic examination of all the electoral materials used in the conduct of the elections, as well as to avail them the Certified True Copy of result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.
