The Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (Court of Appeal) on Wednesday, March 8 granted the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) permission to reconfigure its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the March 11 state elections.
The Presidential Election Petition Tribunal also granted leave to President-elect Bola Tinubu to access sensitive materials used by INEC for the conduct of the 2023 presidential election.
INEC had argued that all data in BVAS machines would be transferred to a back end server before the reconfiguration.
The electoral umpire stated that during the transfer of the data to the backend, the data cannot be tampered with.
The Court of Appeal held that not granting INEC’s request would jeopardize the governorship and House of Assembly elections holding on Saturday, March 11, 2023.
A three-member panel of the appellate court, led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh, granted leave to the applicant for the purposes of configuring the BVAS for the election on Saturday.
The panel, however, asked INEC to upload data to the back-end server and make true certified copy to the respondents.
INEC in its motion filed on March 4, asked the appellate court to vary the ex-parte order made in favour of the Labour Party (LP) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), with regards to the inspection of materials used for the presidential election.
The appellate court had on March 3, granted leave to Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Mr. Peter Obi of LP to inspect election materials used by INEC to conduct the February 25 presidential election.
The court granted the duo permission following two separate ex parte applications filed by Atiku and Obi, who came second and third respectively in the presidential election won by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
The commission is asking the court to vary the order to allow it to reconfigure its BVAS for the March 11 governorship and state houses of assembly elections.
Counsel to INEC, Tanimu Inuwa (SAN), said the application became necessary following an order restraining it from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until due inspection was conducted and certified.
He added that the commission would require sufficient time to reconfigure the BVAS needed to conduct the election that would take place on Saturday.
He told the court that INEC would upload from back-end.
In his argument, counsel for Obi, Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu (SAN) prayed the court not to grant INEC’s application for granting it would mean losing the original information there.
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