BVAS Reconfiguration Ready Tuesday As INEC Confirms 170,000 Presidential Results Uploaded on IReV

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has revealed that over 170,000 polling unit results from the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25 had been uploaded to its Result Viewing Portal (IReV).

The electoral body added that the reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) would be completed by Tuesday in time for the March 18 gubernatorial and state assembly elections.

This was announced by the Commission’s National Commissioner, Festus Okoye saying: “As at the last time, over 170,000 of those results have been uploaded.

“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.”

Every Nigerian, according to Okoye, has the constitutional and legal right to protest.

However, he stated that no political party would be permitted to examine the BVAS’s brain or voter biometrics.

He stated that INEC was the regulator of political parties and that the commission would not abdicate its primary responsibility to dissatisfied  political parties.

He stated that the court decision allowing voters to vote using temporary voter cards did not apply to all Nigerians, but only to those who went to court.

In addition, the INEC commissioner blamed political parties for making polling units “inaccessible” to voters, resulting in low turnout at the last election.

He stated that INEC learned “valuable lessons” from the presidential and National Assembly elections that would be applied to the governorship and state assembly elections.

He stated that serious efforts are being made to resolve issues with the IReV portal ahead of the March 18 polls, and that the commission’s ICT department is aware of what to do if there are issues with the uploading of polling unit results on the IReV portal during the 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 continued: “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.”

The IReV and BVAS are new technologies introduced by the electoral body for voting accreditation and electronic transmission in this year’s elections.

During the presidential and National Assembly elections, opposition parties were outraged that INEC officials at polling units were unable to electronically upload election results to the IReV, as required by Section 60 of the Electoral Act 2022. The parties fought against the manual collation of results and the announcement of poll winners.

The electoral body promised to fix the problems, but opposition parties have gone to court to challenge the victory of All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate Bola Tinubu, who was declared Nigeria’s President-Elect by the electoral umpire.

A Court of Appeal in Nigeria’s political capital, Abuja, granted INEC permission to reconfigure the BVAS for the governorship and state assembly elections last week.

The Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, had requested a court order prohibiting INEC from tampering with the information in the BVAS machines until the necessary inspection is carried out and certified true copies (CTC) are issued.