Court allows INEC to reconfigure BVAS

Thu, Mar 9, 2023
By editor
3 MIN READ

Judiciary

THE Appeal court on Wednesday granted the prayers of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC to reconfigure the BVAS machine for the governorship and State Assembly election. Peter Obi had pleaded with the court that reconfiguring the BVAS will wipe out the data used in the presidential election whose result they are contesting in court. But counsel to INEC had told the court that the reconfiguration of BVAS will not affect the data which will be transferred to the backend of INEC server.

The court also refused to vary relief earlier granted to counsels of Obi for INEC to make the election material available to Obi and his lawyers for inspection.

The three-member panel held that granting the order sought by obi will hamper the elections slated for Saturday.

The court held that granting the order will amount to tying down the hands of the electoral body and preventing it from carrying out the functions assigned to it by the 1999 constitution.

The court ordered INEC on March 3 to allow the applicants to inspect and carry out digital forensic examination of all the electoral materials used in the conduct of the elections.

Also  to avail them the Certified True Copy, CTC, of result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.

The panel held that the request was earlier granted, adding that repeating the prayer amounted to an abuse of court process.

INEC had insisted that the reconfiguration of the BVAS was necessary since they would be deployed for the next round of elections on Saturday.

The commission added that without a prompt variation of the order the court earlier granted to Obi and the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, especially the aspect restraining it from tampering with information contained in the BVAS.

It would be difficult for it to proceed with the scheduled elections INEC added.

Obi and his party had in their application marked: CA/PEC/09m/23, sought permission to be allowed to conduct physical inspection of all the BVAS that were used for the presidential poll.

The applicants, through their team of lawyers led by Dr Onyechi Ikpeazu, SAN, said the essence of the application was to enable them to extract data embedded in the BVAS, “which represent the actual results from Polling Units.”

They specifically applied for; “leave to carryout digital forensic and physical inspection of BVAS, among others ”, as well as to obtain the Certified True Copy, CTC, of all the data in the BVAS.”

While opposing the application, INEC through its lawyer,  Tanimu Inuwa, SAN told the court that there were a total of 176,000 BVAS that were deployed to polling units during the presidential election.

“Each polling unit has its own particular BVAS machine which will need to be reconfigured 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.

“We need the BVAS reconfigured.

” So, granting this application will be a cog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections” Inuwa pleaded. (with agency report)

A.

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