The Governorship and House of Assembly elections scheduled to hold on Saturday, March 11, may be postponed unless the Presidential Election Petition Court varies the orders that were granted to the candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP), Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, respectively, to inspect materials used for the last presidential election.
Recall that the Court of Appeal on March 3 granted leave to Atiku and Obi to inspect election materials used by INEC in the conduct of the February 25 presidential election.
However, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) applied to the tribunal in a motion on notice filed on March 4, praying the court to vary the order which restrained it from tampering with materials used for the election.
According to the electoral umpire, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) used for the first batch of elections must be reconfigured for the next round of elections on March 11.
The commission said that it needed to reconfigure its 176,846 BVAS for the March 11 governorship and state houses of assembly elections.
The Punch quoted an unnamed official as saying that INEC needed to reconfigure the BVAS used for the February 25 elections and deploy them to polling units for the March 11 elections considering the number of BVAS required to conduct the election across the states.
According to the source, the technical team to be deployed by the commission for the reconfiguration would need to reconfigure each BVAS device one by one, hence must be deployed quickly.
The official noted that failure to obtain the tribunal’s order sought by the commission could result in the postponement of the March 11 elections.