By Vivian Okejeme, Abuja
In view of the Saturday, March 11 governorship elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has asked the Court of Appeal to discard the ex parte order okaying Labour Party and the People’s Democratic Party, (PDP) request to access materials used for the presidential poll.
The appellate court had on March 3, granted leave to Atiku Abubakar of the PPD and Mr Peter Obi of Labour Party to inspect election materials used by INEC to conduct the Feb. 25 presidential election.
However, INEC, yesterday, approached the court, asking it to vary the order to enable it reconfigure its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the March 11 governorship and state houses of assembly elections.
Meantime, no date has been fixed for hearing of the application.
According to a reliable source, who doesn’t want his name in print, the application became necessary following an order restraining it from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until due inspection was conducted and Certified True Copies of them were issued.
He said INEC would require sufficient time to reconfigure the BVAS needed to conduct the election that would take place in the 36 states of the federation excluding the FCT.
Speaking further, he said the number of BVAS required to conduct the election across the states, INEC needs to reconfigure the BVAS used for the Feb. 25 elections and deploy them to polling units for the March 11 elections.
The source said that the technical team of the commission had to be deployed on time to start the reconfiguration of the devices, which had to be done one by one.
He maintained that discarding the ex-parte order was important, adding that not getting it could result to a postponement of the Saturday governorship and state houses of assembly elections.
