The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has pledged to address all identified challenges with its newly introduced Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) ahead of FCT Area Council election in February.
Mr Festus Okoye, INEC National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, in a statement in Abuja Thursday, said that the commission at a meeting this week conducted an initial review of the Anambra governorship election, while awaiting the reports of officials deployed for the election, for an in-depth review of the processes.
The INEC commissioner said that after the supplementary election in Ihiala Local Government Area (LGA) on November 9 and before the process was concluded, INEC commenced a preliminary review of the functionality of systems, particularly the newly introduced BVAS.
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He noted that the commission acknowledged that the device performed optimally in the uploading of election results to the commission’s dedicated portal.
“The system performed two functions on election day. First is the accreditation of voters using both the fingerprint and facial authentication.
“Secondly, it snaps the polling unit level result sheets and uploads them in real-time to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal.
“This aspect of the BVAS functionality performed optimally such that by the early hours of Sunday morning, results from 4,987 (88.5 per cent) out of 5,634 polling units had been upoladed for public view.
“While still in the field, our ICT team responded to the identified glitches in the accreditation of voters and corrected them,” he said.
Okoye added: “Consequently, in the Ihiala supplementary election, there were no reported incidents of BVAS malfunction.
“We will carry out an in-depth examination of the system, review reports from accredited observers and the media and respond to all identified challenges ahead of the next major Area Council election in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), holding on Feb. 12, 2022.
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“We shall again test run the system in the by-election (s) that may arise before then.
“The commission remains convinced that despite some glitches experienced in Anambra State Governorship election, the deployment of technology in elections is better than the best manual process.”
