The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has announced that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) did not fail in the last gubernatorial election in Osun State.
According to vanguard, INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, stated this yesterday while speaking to newsmen while observing the accreditation process at the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
It would be recalled that the Osun State Governorship Election Tribunal had impeached Governor Ademola Adeleke for inflating votes in over 700 polling stations in the governorship election. The court asked INEC to issue a certificate of return to former governor Gboyega Oyetola.
However, the ruling has caused controversy and many Nigerians are questioning how the over-voting could have happened even with the BVAS system in place.
Yakubu, who spoke for the first time on the issue and explained that the BVAS machine had not been tested as claimed in some quarters, said the commission had learnt lessons from the court’s decision.
The INEC chief said although comments on the matter were subject to judicial review as the case was still in court, he assured that the commission would use the lessons learnt from the Osun judgment to improve the election process which will be held later this month.
Asked about the Osun judgment, Yakubu said: “The BVAS system has never failed anywhere and as you can see here, the machine has indeed never failed. I would not like to comment on the current court case as it is the subject of a legal process, but in every situation the commission is learning and learning lessons from what happened to improve procedures for the next election. We have learned lessons from what happened and one of those lessons is the need to be able to communicate accreditation information.
“In this experiment, we prepared result sheets that would transmit accreditation data, but there are no result sheets here because people did not vote.
“So we have created a new URL on the INEC results viewer portal (IReV) for those of you who are on the IReV portal. And if you go home after 2:30pm, you will see the results of the draw transmitted from the 437 polling stations across the country, accreditation data, and we will transmit both the results on election day and the accreditation data, so the two data will rhyme.
“We assure Nigerians that the accreditation data and the actual votes cast will be transmitted simultaneously and accurately on election day.”
Speaking on the trial accreditation, Yakubu described the process as smooth, saying the commission had decided to conduct the exercise to further verify the integrity of the machines that would be installed on election day.
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