On Thursday, the Labour Party slammed the Independent National Electoral Commission, claiming that the electoral umpire deliberately came up with the idea of reconfiguring the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines after its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, tried to look at the materials for the election.
This was due to the party’s disagreement with the commission’s claim that the data retrieved from the BVAS was backed up without the presence of impartial witnesses or political party representatives.
In order to reconfigure the BVAS machines, INEC rescheduled the governorship and states House of Assembly elections that had been scheduled for March 11 just 24 hours earlier.
After the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja granted the commission’s request to reconfigure the BVAS used in the presidential election, the move was made possible.
In a three-member panel of justices’ unanimous decision, the court ruled that stopping the electoral umpire from reconfiguring the BVAS would have a negative impact on the upcoming governorship and state Assembly elections.
However, Yunusa Tanko, the Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Council’s Chief Spokesman, reiterated that INEC’s claim that it had backed up the BVAS data without a witness was incorrect.
Tanko also said that the electoral umpire kept changing the rules of engagement all the time to hide some of the oddities they had seen earlier.