The Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja, on Wednesday, granted the request by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, used for the February 25, 2023, presidential election, in readiness for the next round of elections, according to Vanguard report.
In a unanimous judgment, the Court dismissed the objections raised by the Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi against INEC's move to reconfigure all the BVAS.
The three-member panel of justices, led by
Justice Joseph Ikyegh ruled that the upcoming governorship and state Assembly elections would be adversely affected if INEC was not allowed to reconfigure the BVAS.
The court also ruled that it would amount to, “tying the hands of the respondent, INEC,” if it allowed the objections by Obi and his party.
It noted that INEC had given assurances in its affidavit filed before the court, that it would store the accreditation data contained in the BVAS on its accredited back-end server where they would be
safe and easy to retrieve.
The Court further stated that since neither Obi nor LP disputed the statements in INEC’s affidavit, that meant the applicants accepted the dispositions.
However, the court again directed the INEC to allow the applicants to inspect and conduct a digital forensic examination of all the electoral materials used for the presidential elections, and make available to the applicants, the Certified True Copy, CTC, of the result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.
It faulted Obi and LP for repeating that request to scan and make copies of the electoral materials in INEC’s possession., saying that the petition had been granted and bringing it up again amounted to an abuse of the court process.
Obi and his party LP, through their team of lawyers led by Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu,
had made an application identified as CA/PEC/09m/23, asking the Court to order INEC to allow them to physically inspect all the BVAS used for the presidential poll, to
enable them to extract data embedded therein, “which represent the actual results from Polling Units.”
The applicants specifically requested; “leave to carry out a digital forensic and physical inspection of BVAS, etc”, as well as to obtain the Certified True Copy, CTC, of all the data in the BVAS.”
But, INEC via its lead counsel, Tanimu Inuwa (SAN), objected to the petition, arguing that, if granted it would disrupt the conduct of the remaining elections, adding that it would be hard for the Commission, within the period to reconfigure the entire 176,000 BVAS used in the presidential election and deploy same for the governorship and state Assembly elections.
“Each polling unit has its own particular BVAS machine which we need to configure for the forthcoming elections.
“It will be very difficult for us, within the period, to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS.
“We have already stated in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost as we will transfer all the data in the BVAS to our back-end server.
“We need the BVAS configured. So, granting this application will be a cog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections,” INEC said.
Politics and Opinion.
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