Dark clouds over INEC’s ability to deliver March 11 governorship, state assemblies’ polls further thicken as usage of BVAS machines is tentative

The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has entered a confusion mode over its planned conduct of the March 11 governorship and House of Assemblies’ elections.

The confusion stemmed from the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, machines that are to be deployed in states for the Saturday polls.

The INEC has been restrained from touching and tampering with the BVAS by the Court which granted the prayers of the presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party PDP, and Labour Party, LP, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, that the BVAS should not be tampered with by the Commission.

The Commission needs to use the BVAS machines for the March 11 elections, and that would require that it reconfigures the machines for the purpose of capturing the units and delivering a timely upload of results to the IREV portal.

Advertisement

Realising that it could not proceed to reconfigure the BVAS machines with the court order still in place, the Commission had proceeded to the Court of Appeal with a prayer to vary the coury order that had tied its hands.

The Court of Appeal will today rule on the applied by INEC one way or another.

THE CONCLAVE reports that the entire system is on the horn of dilemma: while the Commission would have just gone ahead to reconfigure the BVAS machines, Atiku and Obi had retrained them since they needed the information contained in them to strengthen and prove their cases in the Election Petitions Ttibunal.

It is feared that reconfiguring the machines would affect the presidential poll information contained therein.

So what happens?

Will the Appeal Court rule in favour of the Comission or preserve the earlier order on the Commission not to tamper with the BVAS and to allow Atiku and Obi to inspect them and other materials in the interest of fairness and justice?

Interestingly, the winner of the presidential election, Bola Tinubu, has also approached the court seeking its leave to also inspect poll materials.

What will be the ruling of the Court of Appeal- to allow or not to allow INEC to reconfigure the BVAS machines?

If it grants the Commission, the opposition parties in court would not be able to prove their cases with evidence from the BVAS.

If it does not grant the Commission’s prayer to reconfigure, how will the Commission be able to conduct the March 11 elections without the BVAS machines without further running foul of its own rules and the law?

THE CONCLAVE reports that there are feelers the March 11 polls may be shifted for a few weeks if the Court of Appeal does not grant it the leave to reconfigure them for the exercise.

The Commission would expect that the parties would have been able to conduct their inspections and round them off timeously in accessing and compiling their evidence.

Nigerians wait with bated breath for the ruling by the Court of Appeal today, which will certainly go one way or another.