The Peoples Democratic Party’s Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party’s Peter Obi, respectively, were given orders to inspect the materials used for the previous presidential election, but the Independent National Electoral Commission has urged the Presidential Election Petition Court to modify those orders.
In a move on notice submitted on March 4, INEC asks the court to modify the ruling prohibiting it from tampering with election-related materials.
For the subsequent round of voting, the commission ruled that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System needed to be modified.
Atiku of the PDP and Obi of the Labour Party were given permission to examine election materials used by INEC to conduct the February 25 presidential election by the appellate court on March 3.
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Following two separate ex parte requests made by Atiku and Obi, who finished second and third in the presidential election won by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, the court granted the pair permission.
The commission is requesting that the court modify the order in its application, which was submitted and seen by NAN, so that it may reconfigure its BVAS in time for the March 11 gubernatorial and state house of assembly elections.
According to NAN, the election umpire’s motion to the court included just this one prayer.
Yet, there is no set time for the application’s hearing.
According to a reliable source in the commission, the application was required as a result of a court order prohibiting the commission from altering the data stored on the BVAS machines until a proper inspection had been carried out and Certified True Copies had been given.
The source, who spoke off-camera, stated that the commission would need enough time to reconfigure the BVAS required to conduct the poll, which would take place across the 36 states of the federation apart from the FCT.
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The source claims that INEC needs to reconfigure the BVAS used for the elections on February 25 and deploy them to polling places for the elections on March 11. This is due to the quantity of BVAS needed to conduct the election throughout the states.
According to the source, the commission’s technical team needed to be dispatched promptly in order to begin the one-by-one reconfiguration of the devices.
According to the source, the directive was necessary since failure to receive it may force the Saturday elections for the state houses of assembly and governor to be postponed.
