BVAS will be deactivated when snatched

Less than 16 days to the general election, the Independent National Electoral Commission has given assurance that the Bimodal Voter Registration System cannot be manipulated.

The INEC Deputy Director of Information and Communications Technology, Lawrence Bayode, disclosed this while speaking on Channels Television’s special election programme, The 2023 Verdict, on Wednesday.

In Nigeria, ballot boxes are usually snatched during elections by hoodlums or gunmen to disrupt the voting process.

According to Bayode, the BVAS will be deactivated from the backend so that whoever snatched the device on Election Day will not be able to manipulate votes.

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.”

Bayode said if hoodlums took the device to other places where they think they can manipulate the data on the device, the polling unit officer will report the incident.

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.”

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