The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is set to postpone the March 11 governorship and state assembly elections.
The electoral body is expected to make an announcement on Wednesday night after a meeting between the chairman and national commissioners.
Some reports say that the legal battles that INEC has been involved with especially with regards to Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) at the presidential and national assembly polls on February 25 has hampered preparations for the polls.
The Labour Party and its presidential candidate Peter Obi challenged the decision by INEC to reconfigure BVAS ahead of the March 11 polls, stressing that, the data on BVAS is crucial to its bid to overturn the presidential election that produced Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as president-elect.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar also challenged electoral body’s decision to reconfigure BVAS too.
In a ruling today by Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) sitting in the Court of Appeal in Abuja, INEC was granted permission to reconfigure BVAS.
INEC told the court that its decision to reconfigure BVAS will not affect the data collected during the presidential election.
The electoral body argued that granting a request to halt the reconfiguration would affect its preparations for the impending governorship and state assembly elections.
“Each polling unit has its own peculiar BVAS machine which we need to configure for the forthcoming elections.
“It will be very difficult for us, within the period, to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS.
“We have already stated in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost as we will transfer all the data to our back-end server.
“We need the BVAS configured. So, granting this application will be a clog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections”, INEC’s lead lawyer, Tanimu Inuwa, SAN, pleaded.
