BVAS cannot be manipulated if snatched, says INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission has guaranteed that the Bimodal Voter Registration System cannot be exploited with less than 16 days till the general elections.

On Wednesday, Lawrence Bayode, INEC’s deputy director of information and communications technology, appeared on Channels Television’s special election show, The 2023 Verdict.

Elections in the past have seen violence by hoodlums and vote box stealing.

In order to prevent anyone who stole the device on election day from being able to tamper with votes, Bayode claims that the BVAS will be deactivated from the back-end.

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 back-end.”

Bayode said if hoodlums take 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 noted, “If such thing happens, the PO reports and from the back-end, that device is deactivated so that the person who took away that device will not be able to do anything with the device.”