The court of Appeal has granted the President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu permission to inspect election materials used for the just concluded presidential election.
Delivering a ruling filed in an exparte motion filed by the president-elect a 3 member panel of the tribunal led by Justice Joseph Nkechi held that there is substance in the application and the applicant is entitled to have access to all the materials used in the presidential election.
The court also granted permission to the independent national national electoral commission, INEC to reconfigure the bimodal voter’s accreditation system, BVAS.
The Labour Party and it’s presidential candidate had approached the court seeking to stop INEC from reconfiguring the BVAS.
They argued that when the BVAS systems are reconfigured, the data contained in them will be lost.
INEC in its defense noted that the data will be stored in their back end servers and made available to any presidential candidate that needs it.
The appellant court refused the application filed by INEC seeking to vary its earlier order made, which had granted permission to the Labour Party to have access to the election materials.
Counsel to INEC had noted that their fear was that the the order will give the Labour Party access to identifying how a particular voter voted, hence the application for the court to vary the order.
Labour Party had sought a forensic analysis of the ballot paper and access to INEC server which had the biometric data of all voters.
If the ballot paper is matched with the forensic analysis of data in its server it will show how every voter voted, this defeated the purpose of secret ballot.
The court has however clarified the order it made.
With the ruling of the court, INEC is cleared to conduct the governorship and state of Assembly elections with out any room for postponement.
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