We’ll Make BVAS Useless If Snatched By Thugs – INEC

Political thugs who snatch the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines during the forthcoming general election will not be able to make use of them, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said.

According to INEC, snatched BVAS machines would be deactivated remotely and made inaccessible to political thugs or saboteurs.

Lawrence Bayode, INEC’s Deputy Director of Information and Communications Technology, disclosed on Wednesday during an interview on Channels TV.

“If a BVAS is snatched, we have a system in place that can deactivate that particular BVAS.

“We deactivate it so that whoever snatches the device will not be able to do anything with the device because the device pushes the accreditation data automatically on its own even without the operator pushing a button. When it is idle, it pushes that accreditation data to the backend,” said Bayode who also noted that election presiding officers will notify INEC will such machines are taken to other polling units.

During a two-day capacity building held for journalists in November, Bode disclosed that INEC has a dashboard from which over 2000,000 BVAS machines being deployed for the national and state elections can be monitored from.

From the dashboard, the commission monitors the movement of the machines via GPS tracking and could tell if a machine was turned off during elections.