The Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja says INEC can carry on with the reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
The decision was reached by a three-member panel of Justices in a unanimous decision on Wednesday.
The court says that stopping the electoral body from reconfiguring the BVAS would affect the forthcoming Governorship and State Assembly elections.
Tying INEC’s Hands
The court countered Labour Party’s objections against INEC’s move to reconfigure all the BVAS.
The court says allowing the objections by Obi and his party, would amount to “tying the hands of the Respondent, INEC”.
INEC in an affidavit filed before the court, assured the parties that the accreditation data contained in the BVAS could not be tampered with or lost, as they would be stored and easily retrieved from its accredited back-end server.
They observe that neither Obi or LP controverted the depositions in INEC’s affidavit, also since such averments were not challenged, it amounted to admission by the Applicants.
Abuse Of Court Process
Also, the court ordered INEC to allow the Applicants to inspect and carry out digital forensic examination of all the electoral materials used in the conduct of the elections, as well as to avail them the Certified True Copy, of result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.
The Justice Joseph Ikyegh-led panel faults Obi and LP for repeating their request to be allowed to scan and make copies of the electoral materials in INEC’s possession.
To the court, the request was earlier granted.
The panel says repeating the prayer amounted to an abuse of court process.
Furthermore, on the BVAS machine, INEC insisted that the reconfiguration was necessary since they would be deployed for the next round of elections.
It maintained that without a prompt variation of the order the court earlier granted to Obi and the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, especially the aspect restraining it from tampering with formation contained in the BVAS, it would be difficult for it to proceed with the scheduled elections.
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INEC lead lawyer, Tanimu Inuwa, in his plea says, “each polling unit has its own particular BVAS machine which we need to configure for the forthcoming elections.
“It will be very difficult for us, within the period, to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS.
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“We have already stated in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost, as we will transfer all the data in the BVAS to our back-end server.
“We need the BVAS configured. So, granting this application will be a clog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections”.
