Less than 16 days before the general elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) assured the public that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) cannot be manipulated. Lawrence Bayode, INEC’s Deputy Director of Information and Communications Technology, explained the safeguards on Channels Television’s special election programme, *The 2023 Verdict*, on Wednesday.
In previous elections, ballot‑box snatching and violence by hoodlums were common concerns. Bayode emphasized that BVAS devices can be deactivated remotely from the back‑end. “If a BVAS is snatched, we have a system in place that can deactivate that particular BVAS,” he said. “We deactivate it so that whoever takes the device cannot do anything with it, because the device automatically pushes accreditation data to the back‑end even without the operator pressing a button. When it is idle, it still transmits that data.”
Should hoodlums seize a device and attempt to manipulate it elsewhere, the polling unit officer must report the incident. Bayode added, “If such a thing happens, the PO reports it, and from the back‑end the device is deactivated, preventing the thief from using it.”
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