The Independent National Electoral Commission has postponed the governorship and state assembly elections scheduled to hold on March 11 by one week.
The Independent National Electoral Commission has postponed the governorship and state assembly elections scheduled to hold on March 11 by one week.
The elections will now hold on March 18, 2023.
This was made known in a statement signed by the National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, INEC, Festus Okoye on Wednesday.
The postponement is coming about three days before the March 11 date earlier scheduled for the state elections.
Consequently, all activities pertaining to the exercise are rescheduled, especially the states inspection of sensitive materials at the Central Bank of Nigeria.
INEC’s decision was due to the commission’s inability to earnestly commence reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines utilised during the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections to enable their use in the state elections.
The Presidential Election Petition Court, sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja, had earlier today given INEC the go ahead to reconfigure the BVAS it used for the presidential election.
It dismissed objections that the Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, raised against INEC’s move to reconfigure all the BVAS.
According to the court, allowing the objections by Obi and his party would amount to tying the hands of the respondent, INEC.
However, INEC stated that the reconfiguration of BVAS will take days which might not lead to a credible governorship and state House of Assembly elections, hence the need to reschedule.
The commission noted that campaigns for the March 18 polls will continue until March 16.
According to INEC, the move was to make available enough time to back up the data stored in over 176,000 BVAS.
Okoye said, “This decision has not been taken lightly but it is necessary to ensure that there is adequate time to back up the data stored on the over 176,000 BVAS machines from the Presidential and National Assembly elections held on 25th February 2023 and then to reconfigure them for the Governorship and State Assembly elections.
“This has been the practice for all elections, including the period when the Commission was using the Smart Card Readers.”
Okoye assured political parties and candidates that the data from the 25 February polls would be backed up, adding that political parties could apply for Certified True Copies of the backend data of the BVAS.
