The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has rescheduled the Gubernatorial and State Assembly elections following the ruling at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal on Wednesday.
In a statement signed by the National Commissioner and Chairman, of Information and Voter Education, Barrister Festus Okoye, it revealed that the election will now take place on the 18th of March 2023.
It stated that the commission is not against litigants who want to inspect the election materials to pursue their case in court and reassured political parties and candidates that INEC will back up all data from the Presidential and Senatorial election in its cloud facilities.
It also urged political parties to apply for certified copies of the backend data of the BVAS.
The Court of Appeal led by Joseph Ikyegh on Wednesday granted the Labour Party and Mr. Peter Obi access to inspect the election materials and also permitted INEC to reconfigure the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS) ahead of the governorship and state assembly elections.
The Counsel of the INEC, Tanimu Inuwa, who spoke on Tuesday while moving an application seeking to vary the orders of the court which permitted Obi and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to inspect all the sensitive materials used in the conduct of the presidential election held on February 25.
“Each polling unit has its own particular BVAS machine which we need to configure for the forthcoming elections,” he said.
“It will be very difficult for us, within the period, to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS for the election.
“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 backend server. Our backend server preserves the data.
“So, granting this application will be a clog in the process and disrupt the conduct of the elections.”
