170,000 PUs On IReV, BVAS Reconfiguration To Be Completed Tuesday – INEC

“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.”

Legal Battle

The IReV and the BVAS are new technologies introduced by the electoral body for the accreditation and electronic transmission of votes for this year’s polls.

At the presidential and National Assembly polls, opposition parties complained bitterly that INEC officials at the polling units were unable to upload election results electronically to the IReV, as stipulated by Section 60 of the Electoral Act 2022. The parties kicked against the manual collation of results and the announcement of winners in the polls.

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

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

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 (CTC) of them issued.

But on Wednesday, a three-member panel of the court of appeal led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh granted INEC’s request to reconfigure the BVAS machines on the ground that the information on them would be uploaded into the back-end server which cannot be tampered with.

The commission subsequently postponed the governorship and state assembly polls by one week from March 11 to March 18 to allow for the reconfiguration of BVAS machines.

Source:- Channels Tv