BVAS Will Prevent Reconfiguration If ‘Entire Data’ Not Uploaded To Server – INEC 

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said unless “entire data” in a Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machine has been uploaded to its server, the device will not allow itself to be reconfigured.

Festus Okoye, INEC’s Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, stated this when he appeared on Channels TV ‘Sunday Politics’ on Sunday night.

Reconfiguration of the BVAS, which is a technology-based solution designed to verify the identity of voters, has been the subject of intense public debate due to the disappointment that trailed INEC’s failure to electronically transmit results of Nigeria’s presidential and national assembly elections in real-time using the machines.

Amid different lawsuits being filed by candidates seeking to challenge the outcome of the presidential election, INEC said the BAVS devices which contain results of the polls would need to be reset to enable their use for subsequent state elections.

Okoye, however, explained on the TV programme that no BVAS device can be reconfigured without the data on it being backed up on the commission’s server.

“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,” he said.

Okoye said as of time of speaking, election results on about 170,000 out of over 179,000 devices have been uploaded to the commission’s server, adding that the process is expected to be conclude on Tuesday (tomorrow) ahead of the governorship and state assembly elections rescheduled for March 11.

Speaking further on suits relating to requests by aggrieved presidential candidates to inspect materials used for the election, Okoye said the electoral umpire cannot allow a second party to access biometric data of voters.

“The Electoral Act 2022 makes it clear that every registered political party in conjunction with their candidates have the right to send agents to every polling units in Nigeria. The PDP as a political party deployed a total of 176,588 polling agents. The Labour Party deployed a total of 134,874 polling agents. The NNPP deployed a total of 176,200 while the APC deployed a total of 176,223.

“The commission deployed to 176,666 polling units. So, the political parties deployed more agents to the polling units than the number of polling units that opened. What that means is that each political party got a copy of Form EC 8 which is the polling unit result sheet which is the result sheet that is uploaded into the IReV portal,” said the commissioner.