The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says it will complete the reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) by Tuesday.
This was in preparation for the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections.
Festus Okoye, the commission’s National Commissioner in charge of publicity and voter education disclosed this in an interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.
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Okoye also stated that over 170,000 polling unit results of the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections have been uploaded on its Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
He, however, disclosed that no political party would be allowed access to the brain of the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems used for voter accreditation and electronic transmission of votes.
He said:
“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 explained that INEC was the regulator of political parties and the commission won’t abdicate its core responsibility to aggrieved political parties.
He said the court judgment that voters could use their temporary voter cards to vote is not applicable for all Nigerians but for the individuals who went to court.
The INEC commissioner also blamed political parties for making polling units “inaccessible” for voters, leading to low turnout at the last polls.
He said INEC learned some “valuable lessons” in the presidential and National Assembly elections, which would be used in the governorship and state assembly polls.
He said serious efforts were being made to rectify challenges with the IReV portal ahead of the March 18 polls, adding that the ICT department of the commission knows what to do if there are issues with the uploading of polling unit results on the IReV portal in March 18 polls.
He said political parties deployed more polling unit agents than the number of officials deployed by the Commission and so they monitored their results per polling units.
The INEC commissioner said:
“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.”
