Gov Election: INEC Mulls Postponement Over BIVAS

The postponement of the March 11, 2023 governorship election will become inevitable except the Court of Appeal grants the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC permission to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BIVAS.

This is the position of the Prof. Mahmood Yakub-led INEC barely five days into the election, the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN said.

The electoral umpire said it is prepared for the governorship and state houses of Assembly elections in at least 30 states across the country

But there is a snag. The court must make a pronouncement for the BIVAS, used in the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections, to be reconfigured so that they can be used for the election this weekend.

INEC, according to sources has gone to the Court of Appeal to vacate a court order secured by the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP last week to restrain the commission from tampering with the materials used during the presidential election, for which Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, APC has now been declared the winner.

Information embedded in the BVAS machines must not be tampered with until the due inspection was conducted and certified true copies of them issued the court said.

Sources in the Commission disclosed on Sunday that the order will prevent it from conducting the election except it is vacated by a higher court.

The source, who requested anonymity, said INEC would require sufficient time to reconfigure the BVAS needed to conduct the elections that would take place on Saturday.

“The commission’s legal department is actually preparing an application to be filled in the court on Monday to seek an order for it to reconfigure its BVAS for Saturday governorship and state houses of assembly elections,” the source said.

The source further stated that considering the number of BVAS required to conduct the election across states, INEC needed to reconfigure the BVAS used for the March 25 elections and deploy them to polling units for the upcoming election.

Another source in the Commission added that INEC technical team have to be deployed on time to commence the re-configuration of the device, which has to be done one by one.

Therefore, the order was important if the Saturday governorship and state parliamentary elections must hold as scheduled, otherwise the postponement of the election became inevitable.

On Friday, the Abuja Division of the Court of Appeal granted leave to the presidential candidates of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, and his Peoples Democratic Party counterpart, Atiku Abubakar, to have access to all the sensitive materials used by INEC for the conduct of the February 25 presidential election.

A panel of the appellate court led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh made the order after it heard two separate ex parte applications the two aggrieved presidential candidates filed alongside their political parties.

The presidential election has been widely disputed by the PDP and Labour Party, LP candidates who claimed that it was flawed, citing for instance, the refusal of the Commission to upload the results on its platform as required by the Electoral Act.

Meanwhile, the PDP said it is going ahead with its planned protest on Monday against the announcement of Tinubu as the winner of the now contested election.