In the last few days, there has been news going around that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) wants to reconfigure the Bimordal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS).
There are insinuations that the configuration will erase all the data on the system in preparation for the gubernatorial and state assembly elections.
Similarly, the BVAS configuration has been trending on social media in the last few days. One of the tweets that have gone viral is the tweet of Arise TV journalist Rufai Oseni. He said “why does INEC want to configure BVAS? What happens to the data on it.”
Barely 24 hours after he tweeted the claim, it has garnered over 640,000 views.
Claim: Does INEC want to configure BVAS? Will the data record from the just concluded presidential election on the BVAS machine be erased?
Verification
On March 6, 2023, the INEC legal department filed an application at the Court of Appeal in Abuja to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines used for the conduct of the 25 February election.
This move became expedient due to an earlier application at the appellate court by Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP).
As part of the procedure to challenge the outcome of the presidential election, the PDP and LP aspirants approached the presidential election tribunal and sought an order to inspect the sensitive electoral materials (including the BVAS machine).
Similarly, in maintaining the integrity and originality of the data on the BVAS machine, INEC has assured the court (in an affidavit) that the accreditation data contained in the BVAS would not be tampered with or lost, as they would be stored and easily retrieved from its accredited back-end server.
The court also compelled INEC to provide applicants with the Certified True Copy (CTC) of the data available on the BVAS.
Verdict:
The claim that the INEC wants to reconfigure the BVAS machine is TRUE. However, the electoral commission has assured the court and the applicants that the reconfiguration will not lead to loss of data.