BVAS: Opposition parties, civic groups back INEC on use of 'game changer' machine – Premium Times

The BVAS machine.
Technology and innovation are playing an important role in the ongoing transformation of Nigeria’s electoral processes.
Before the current electoral reform exercise began in 2011, the electoral commission, INEC, was one of the least trusted public institutions in the country.
INEC has since increasingly deployed innovation and technology to improve its processes and gain public confidence.
One of these processes is voter registration, an exercise it often carries out ahead of every general election.
But some political actors are said to be up in arms against the use of one of the most recent technologies being deployed for the 2023 general elections, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
Instead, they are said to want INEC to drop BVAS and return to the use of incident forms in the accreditation of voters on election days.
The incident form was cancelled with the introduction of the BVAS machine.
The Intraparty Advisory Council (IPAC), an umbrella body of all the 18 registered political parties in Nigeria, alluded to the development at a meeting in Abuja on Thursday. The IPAC chairman, Yabagi Sani, alleged that efforts were being made in some quarters to remove Mr Yakubu from office, stressing that the end goal of such efforts is to stop the use of BVAS in the coming elections.
”To us in IPAC, the real object of the darts of venom being directed at the person of the Chairman and the institution of the INEC are merely a decoy. The real target of the machinations is the circumvention of the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, the Electronic Transfer of results and the other security devices INEC has deftly and painstakingly put in place to enhance the integrity of the electoral process,” he said.
The introduction of the INEC Voter Enrolment Device (IVED) in 2021 was preceded by at least three other voters’ registration technologies in the last 20 years.
From writing details of voters with pen on a form provided by INEC, Nigeria has moved to a more innovative point.
The country had its first electronic voters roll in 2002 with the introduction of the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology, registering not less than 60 million voters out of the 69 million applicants in what was Nigeria’s biggest database at the time.
Registration sites were set up across the country for prospective voters to fill OMR forms with their fingerprints, ID photographs (taken by digital camera) and other basic information also captured.
But the technology was not without its shortcomings, as the 2003 general elections, under which President Olusegun Obasanjo was re-elected to a second term, were widely discredited.
Therefore, ahead of the 2007 elections, INEC introduced the Direct Data Capture (DDC) Handheld and Direct Data Capture Machine (DDCM) to check multiple registration, voting and other loopholes noticed in the OMR.
While the DDC is a portable mobile phone-like device, the DDCM has a laptop base with a series of components connected to it. This, unlike the OMR, captures and stores voters’ information, and fingerprints. It has a camera for taking pictures, powerbank, External Hard Disk Drive (HDD) for data backup and printer for printing Temporary Voters Card (TVC).
For the 2015 polls, the Smart Card Reader (SCR) was the novelty.

Both DDCMs were in use for over 10 years before the commission migrated to IVED, a device based on an Android tablet. The BVAS is an integrated part of the IVED.
Despite the sophistication of the DDCM and SCR, the electoral system was not immune from manipulation.
In the post 2019 elections, reports by PREMIUM TIMES and other media platforms for instance, captured party agents buying voters’ cards with the complicity of INEC officials.
However, observers said the the introduction of BVAS promises to address some of the challenges and drastically reduce election rigging.
Unlike before, politicians will only be able to manipulate election outcomes henceforth through vote buying at the PUs and no longer through election machines, compromised INEC officers and ballot snatching.
BVAS has a dual capacity for recognising fingerprint and facial features. It ensures that the person holding the voter’s card and trying to vote is the actual owner by matching these distinct features. In other words, the past debacle of politicians buying voters cards from voters and using them to vote enmasse for a particular candidate would be eliminated.
Civil groups and political parties in separate interviews with PREMIUM TIMES said this will make the 2023 general elections to be different.
BVAS, introduced in early 2021, was first deployed for the Isoko South Constituency 1 bye-election into the Delta State House of Assembly held in September of the same year.
However, when the device was also used in the November 2021 Anambra governorship election, it malfunctioned in many polling units across the 21 local government areas of the state. The development cast doubt on the reliability of BVAS for the general election.
Whether or not to accommodate the device in the amended Electoral Act thus generated a heated debate at the National Assembly and other political fora, until the Act was eventually signed in February 2022 by President Muhammadu Buhari.
However, BVAS gained a better appraisal at the off-cycle governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun held this year.

This has greatly boosted the morale of INEC despite the alleged pressure from some politicians on it to drop the device. INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, reiterated this at a quarterly meeting with the media on Thursday in Abuja.

“Voters will be accredited by means of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). There will be no incident form. Results will be transmitted to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal in real time on Election Day.
“We are committed to ensuring that the 2023 General Election is transparent and credible, reflecting the will of the Nigerian people,” he said.
Some of their reasons cited against the use of BVAS include poor telecommunications network, which some fear may deter real time transmission of results from polling units (PUs), and the possibility of high numbers of malfunctioning BVAS during the polls.
The latter is backed by the claim that INEC does not have enough backup BVAS in cases of malfunctioning of the machine during the accreditation exercise.
INEC spokesperson, Festus Okoye, did not respond to calls by this reporter aimed at getting his comments on those concerns.
However, Mboho Eno, a Deputy Director on Election Monitoring and Evaluation at CJID, an NGO, dismissed arguments against the use of BVAS.
Drawing from his on-the-ground experiences on election monitoring over the years, Mr Eno, said INEC does not need to have back up for every BVAS machine at every PU.
“INEC does not need to have a back up machine for each polling unit, all they need to do is to make provision for the percentage malfunction they record while testing them. Let’s say 10 to 15 percent of their total BVAS show signs of malfunction, they can make provision for them.
“If political parties are using the availability of a back-up machine as an excuse, INEC has tried this machine at the sub-national elections, including by-elections, and they have gathered enough information on percentage share of malfunction.
“What is the percentage of people that were not accredited when BVAS was used in previous elections? It was very insignificant. Some of those challenges were there in the Anambra election but look at Osun and Ekiti, those challenges were removed. That alone is a technological progress,” Mr Eno told PREMIUM TIMES.
He said that the campaign for the return of incident forms is dead on arrival given the giant innovative strides Nigeria has recorded in the conduct of elections over the years.
“On the issue of incident form, we are at a stage where the world relies on the use of technology. Why would anyone want to take us back? Incident form is our past and it should remain so.
“No political interest or party should take us back to the days of manual accreditation, we have had enough of that and I am sure that INEC has improved on the effective performance of BVAS.
“Let us also not forget that BVAS has brought in a lot of trust of the electorate in our electoral system. With this machine, more people now believe that votes can truly count,” he added.
In the event of sustained malfunction of the BVAS, the INEC guidelines mandate the suspension of accreditation and voting until a new machine is made available.
Where a replacement BVAS is not available by 2:30 p.m., the usual time for the closure of voting exercise, the Presiding Officer (PO) is expected to report to the LGA and Registration Area (RA) Supervisors, and make a report of the incident.
Voting for the affected PU can then be postponed till the following day or for another fixed date.
This, which is in line with the provision of the 2022 Electoral Act, may allay the genuine concerns against BVAS.
However, the ruling APC and main opposition PDP have both denied applying pressure on INEC to drop BVAS.
In an interview with this reporter on Thursday, a spokesperson of the PDP Presidential Campaign team, Daniel Bwala, pointed his finger at the ruling party.
“Those who are going against BVAS, I must say, are members of the APC. No members of the PDP would be campaigning for that. The whole gambit of an election is that whatever that is decided at the polling unit should be final,” he told this reporter.
“With the introduction of BVAS and their server system, particularly the BVAS, it means anyone whose name you see on the register of voters is the person that will eventually cast its vote on the Election Day. It cures election fraud.
“And with the real time transmission of results, one can be assured that manipulating election results while moving from the polling unit to the Ward or LGA will no longer be there.
“Any human being that is against this is against national security and interest and such kind of human beings should be banished and cast into fire. And usually, politicians who do that are those that don’t have confidence that they will win the election.
“As a political party and a spokesman for the presidential campaign of Atiku Abubakar, we welcome the idea of the amendment of the Electoral Act and all other provisions in this regard. Therefore, anything that will be against the progress made so far in our electoral processes, we are against it.
“It is a primitive and medieval age thing to kick against BVAS,” he said.
The APC spokesperson, Felix Morka, also told PREMIUM TIMES that the party has confidence in the electoral process.
“The All Progressives Congress (APC) has confidence in INEC’s capacity to conduct next year’s general election in compliance with the Electoral Act and its own guidelines,” he said in a WhatsApp chat.
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