With less than 16 days till the general election, the Independent National Electoral Commission has guaranteed that the Bimodal Voter Registration System cannot be altered.
This information was revealed by Lawrence Bayode, the INEC’s deputy director of information and communications technology, on Wednesday during a segment of The 2023 Verdict, a special election program on Channels Television.
In Nigeria, hoodlums or gunmen frequently grab ballot boxes during elections to interfere with the voting process.
In order to prevent anyone who stole the device on Election Day from being able to tamper with votes, Bayode claims that the BVAS will be deactivated from the backend.
He 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.”
According to Bayode, the polling unit officer would report the incident if criminals take the device to other locations where they believe they can change the data on the device.
He said, “If such a 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.”
