BREAKING: Saturday’s Gov Polls Might Be Affected Over LP, PDP Court Order Because of BVAS

It will interest you to note that except the appellate court reverses itself on the relief it granted to the presidential candidates of the Labour Party and Peoples Democratic Party, Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar, the Saturday’s Governorship and State Assembly elections across the country could be postponed.

According to information gathered from Vanguard, it should be recalled that last week, the court had stopped INEC from tampering with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS deployed in last Saturday’s presidential and National Assembly elections. Both Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar sought six and seven principal reliefs from the court which involved an order granting leave to the applicants to carry out Digital Forensic Inspection of BVAS machines used for the conduct of the 25th February 2023 election.

This process involves permission to do electronic scanning and make photocopies of voter’s registration and ballot papers used during the election. For this to be effective, the plaintiffs sought an order restraining INEC from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until the due inspections were conducted and certified.

Based on analysis gathered from The Premium Times, the governorship elections might be jeopardized

because INEC is expected to deploy the same BVAS machines for Saturday’s elections. The commission is expected to reconfigure the devices before the day of the governorship election. According to an analysis gotten from Vanguard, it will interest you to note that it takes an average of five days to configure the BVAS, meaning that the commission has to begin the process of reconfiguration latest by Tuesday.

If this is anything to go by, it means that INEC has to meet the courts to vacate the order to enable the governorship elections hold as scheduled on INEC’s timetable. Presently, there are over 176,000 polling units based on information gathered from INEC. The BVAS is polling units specific, which implies that you cannot do a mass reconfiguration. The machines have to be reconfigured individually and those take an average of five days.

The implication of all these is that; if INEC does not approach the court to vacate the order it granted the Labour Party and Peoples Democratic Party to inspect the BVAS, it simply means that INEC can’t them for the state elections on Saturday. What are your thoughts on this?