INEC Postpones Governorship Election To March 18

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) 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.

Multiple sources, including the Punch quoted a state Resident Electoral Commissioner who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as confirming the decision.

Reports had earlier indicated that the INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, and his commissioners were in a closed-door meeting over the governorship election. The meeting commenced at 7pm on Wednesday.

It was learnt that the postponement was due to the inability of the commission to commence the re-configuration of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines used for the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections, to enable their use for the state elections.

The Court of Appeal in Abuja had on Wednesday, granted the request of the INEC to reconfigure the BVAS ahead of the governorship polls.

The Court granted INEC’s request because the electoral body said all data in BVAS machines would be transferred to a back-end server before they are reconfigured and will not be tampered with.

The court also ordered INEC to allow the Applicants to inspect and carry out digital forensic examination of all the electoral materials used in the conduct of the elections, as well as to avail them the Certified True Copies, of result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.

Recall that Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, was earlier granted leave by the appellate court to inspect the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines and other sensitive materials that INEC deployed for the conduct of the 25 February poll.

The court had restrained INEC from tampering with the BVAS machines.

The three-man panel of the court also granted the request by the President-Elect, Bola Tinubu to also inspect the election materials.