Presidential Elections: Appeal Court grants INEC permission to reconfigure BVAS

The court Appeal in Abuja Nigeria has has granted the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC the permission to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BVAS devices billed for the forthcoming Governorship Election.

The appellate court held that preventing the electoral umpire from performing it’s constitutional functions, will amount to tying down the hands of INEC on its duties as provided for in the 1999 Constitution.

In a rulling on Wednesday by three-man panel led by Justice Joseph Ikhagh and read by Justice Haruna Tsanami, the court agreed that the information in the BVAS had been uploaded into a backend servers for safety.

The court agreed with INEC that the information in the BVAS cannot be tampered with during uploading or got lost in the process.

The court said the information relating to February elections can be retrieved for the purpose of investigation or obtaining information for the purpose of the election.

The court granted INEC to conduct governorship election as contained in the 1999 constitution and cannot be delayed adding that the courts cannot constraint the INEC from doing their job.

In a separate rulling earlier, the court dismissed the request of Mr Obi seeking an order to stop INEC from reconfiguring the BVAS.

Obi’s fear was that the information in the BVAS will be tempered with and the court disagreed with him saying the information from the INEC is that the data is saved which cannot be disputed.

The appellate court also refused INEC application seeking to vary an earlier order granted in favour of Peter Obi as the applicant failed to state that nature of variance or which of the orders they wanted the court to vary.

The court also granted the Labour Party Candidate to electronically scan and photocopy of the ballot Papers used for the conduct of the Presidential elections.

The court did not grant Obi the permission into INEC data base but allow him have Forensic inspection of BVAS used for the February 25 presidential election.

Recall that candidates of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, in their protest against the outcome of the presidential election, obtained an order of court to inspect the materials used in the conduct of the poll, including the BVAS.

In an application, the Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate Peter Obi had sought an order from the court restraining INEC from tampering with the information in the BVAS machines until the due inspection is conducted and certified true copies of them issued.

INEC had declared candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, winner of the presidential election having scored the highest number of votes cast in the election.

The Labour Party Presidential candidate Mr Peter Obi and the National Chairman of the Party Jonathan Abure were physically in the court.

N.O