February 08, (THEWILL) – The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Wednesday, said it would make any Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) snatched by political thugs on election day, irrelevant and useless.
According to the Commission, snatched BVAS machines would be deactivated remotely and made inaccessible to political thugs or saboteurs.
INEC’s Deputy Director of Information and Communications Technology, Lawrence Bayode, disclosed this on Wednesday, during an interview on Channels TV.
The BVAS and INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) are stipulated in the Electoral Act 2022. The BVAS is a technological system that allows the accreditation of voters through biometrics capturing and uploading of results amongst others.
Bayode said, “If a BVAS is snatched, we have a system in place that can deactivate that particular BVAS.
“We deactivate it so that whoever snatches the device will not be able to do anything with the device because the device pushes the accreditation data automatically on its own even without the operator pushing a button. When it is idle, it pushes that accreditation data to the backend.”
During a two-day capacity building held for journalists in November, Bayode disclosed that INEC has a dashboard from which over 200,000 BVAS machines being deployed for the national and state elections can be monitored.
From the dashboard, the Commission monitors the movement of the machines via GPS tracking and could tell if a machine was turned off during elections.
He further explained that if 50 persons were already accredited on a BVAS, and the device is idle, waiting for more voters to come, it will push the 50 already accredited voters to the backend.
“They (hoodlums) can’t take over the accreditation process because the device is designed to push the accredited voters to the backend,” he said.
Bayode also explained that if hoodlums take the device to other places where they think they can manipulate the data on the device, the polling unit officer will report the incident.
“If such thing happens, the PO reports and from the backend, that device is deactivated so that the person who took away that device will not be able to do anything with the device,” he added.
Asked what if the polling unit officer is not able to report the hijack immediately, the INEC official said, “Even at that, the person who took the device won’t be able to do anything.”
Similarly, INEC Director of Voter Education and Publicity, Victor Aluko, said the window for the collection of Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) have closed till after the 2023 general elections.
He said INEC won’t take uncollected PVCs to polling units on election day because that will be a distraction for the polling unit officers
“Whoever genuinely registered and was not able to collect it (PVC), it pains us, but we are assuring them that if they miss this particular election, there are other elections, they will still be able to collect them and vote in the future,” he said.
