Tinubu expresses doubt over INEC’s BVAS, IReV technology for 2023 election

Presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu has expressed his reservations to the use of Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV) for the 2023 election.

Speaking on Monday before a diverse audience at Chatham House in the UK, Tinubu stated that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is yet to assure his team and party that the electronic transmission, the technology being used for the accreditation and the total vote’s counts is reliable and dependable.

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“INEC is still yet to assure us during this election that electronic transmission, the technology being used for the accreditation and the total vote’s counts is reliable, dependable and assuring in our democratic process before we introduce a complicated element of…ballot.

His fresh opposition to the voting technology reinforced the position of the ruling party, which had earlier claimed that Nigeria was not yet ripe for the use of such technology in the 2023 poll.

“We are still losing confidence in our democratic and voting system,” he said.

INEC had insisted that there was no going back on the deployment of the technology for the 2023 election exercise.

Mahmud Yakubu, the chairman of the electoral body had said the introduction of BVAS and IRev, a technology to upload election results in real-time, was to ensure a free, fair and credible election.

While there were alleged moves recently by some political actors in the country to prevail on the electoral umpire to drop the use of BVAS and return to the use of incident forms in the accreditation of voters in the next year’s poll, more Nigerians have embraced the technology and warned that discarding it could spell doom for the entire exercise.