Festus Okoye, a National Commissioner with Nigeria’s electoral body, said no political party will be allowed to look into the brain of the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems used for voter accreditation and electronic transmission of votes.The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Sunday said over 170,000 polling unit results of the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections have been uploaded on its Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
The Commission also said the reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) would be completed by Tuesday in preparation for the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections.As at the last time, over 170,000 of those results have been uploaded,” INEC National Commissioner, Festus Okoye, stated on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.As you are aware, we are reconfiguring the BVAS for purposes of the governorship and state assembly elections, and any BVAS that was used for the presidential and National Assembly elections that do not push to the accreditation backend, the data relating to the conduct of the presidential and National Assembly elections will not be reconfigured.
“In fact, the BVAS will not allow itself to be reconfigured or reset if the entire data is not pushed to the accreditation backend.
“I’m sure that by Tuesday when we hope to complete the resettling of the BVAS for the purposes of the governorship and state assembly elections, the results in all the places where elections were conducted would have been pushed to the accreditation backend.”
‘No Party Allowed To Check BVAS’Okoye said every Nigerian has the constitutional and legal right to protest. However, he said no political party will be allowed to look into the brain of the BVAS or the biometrics of voters.
He noted that INEC is the regulator of political parties and the commission won’t abdicate its core responsibility to aggrieved political parties.
He said the court judgement that voters could use their temporary voter cards to vote is not applicable for all Nigerians but for the individuals who went to court.
The INEC commissioner also blamed political parties for making polling units “inaccessible” for voters, leading to low turnout at the last polls.the information in the BVAS machines until the due inspection is conducted and certified true copies (CTC) of them issued.
But on Wednesday, a three-member panel of the court of appeal led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh granted INEC’s request to reconfigure the BVAS machines on the ground that the information on them would be uploaded into the back-end server which cannot be tampered with.
The commission subsequently postponed the governorship and state assembly polls by one week from March 11 to March 18 to allow for the reconfiguration of BVAS machines.
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