It is quite strange that many, including Lawyers and those who directly participated in the last election, were (are) confused about the role of BVAS and IReV in the electoral process. It is shocking.
Unfortunately, some of these people, with little or no knowledge about how something as basic as BVAS works have been at the vanguard of claims that BVAS failed, didn't work, on account of which they summarily pronounced that the election was manipulated.
The question is - How do you come to the conclusion that something did not work, when you do not even know how it works?
Unfortunately, because these are either participants in the process or thought leaders, people, especially their followers simply assumed they spoke from the point of knowledge.
It was sad to see one of the candidates being tutored on TV on the difference between BVAS and IReV. This was after he had alleged that BVAS had not worked. That his attempt at a 'joke', reconfiguring BVAS as 'basic values acceptable..' failed on the last leg of the acronym did not help matters.
Maupe had offered him a lifeline, but his insistence on mismatching the BVAS-IReV distinction to a 3-course meal only reinforced the fact that he simply did not have an understanding of something so basic, yet critical to the election process.
More shocking was the admission by the Senior Advocate on live TV "that actually BVAS is not what we THOUGHT"
After he had pronounced the election as the worst, he then tells us: "If you listen to the Chairman of the electoral management body, INEC...He made it clear to us, ad nauseam, that BVAS is the magic. Now it turns out that BVAS wasn't the magic...I had the unfortunate displeasure of actually checking what exactly is BVAS in the law. Actually BVAS is not what we thought was presented to us by the National Assembly in the enactment of the Electoral Act 2023...To summarise, BVAS is no more than a tool to accredit the voter..."
I would have thought that the first step would usually be for the Lawyer to check what the law says, rather than thinking or assuming. But what do I know?
The surprise really is that both the Electoral Act and the INEC Guidelines were quite clear on what BVAS is. BVAS is Bimodal Voter Accreditation System and that should tell anyone what it is all about. Section 8 makes the use of BVAS mandatory, which is what makes it a game-changer. Not only does the machine give more than one option for accreditation of voters, it rules out the use of incident forms, which had created avenue for rigging in the past. It was in BVAS shutting the door to non-accredited voters that made it a game-changer. I wonder what else, apart from using the equipment to take a snapshot of election result from the polling unit, that they THOUGHT BVAS was supposed to do.
Already, because accreditation is electronic through BVAS, it made it counter-productive for those with desire to rig through overvoting, as where BVAS is found not to have been used or number of accredited voters in the result sheet is not in tandem with what is found on BVAS, then the results become invalid. If not declared so by INEC, the Court, relying on Section 64 of the Electoral Act, will use it to determine the correctness of a disputed result. That is what makes BVAS a game-changer.
Beyond the argument around BVAS, there is also that about electronic transmission of results from the polling units. I suspect some are confusing the electronic transmission as found in Section 38 of the guidelines in their expectation of what IReV is all about.
On electronic transmission, while Section 38 (I) provides for it, but only as an option, as it also provides for 'transfer'. In the first place, the law gives INEC the leeway to decide on guidelines to be used for the conduct of elections.
I am not aware that INEC promised electronic collation, rather what we saw was a collation process that was manifestly manual, with all the forms for use made available to all parties ahead of the election.
In any case, the result being transmitted or transferred is the same one as obtained at the polling unit and made available to all party agents and security agency present at the point of voting.
Perhaps it is the use of IReV that is the most contentious of all. Section 38(ii) of the INEC Guidelines does indeed provide for the use of "BVAS to upload a SCANNED COPY OF THE EC8A to the INEC Result Viewing Portal."
But I am yet to find in the Guidelines or the Electoral Act where it is provided that the upload has to be instantaneous or mandatorily done from the polling unit. While conceding that the promise that it will be done from the polling unit was indeed made, as previously argued, I cannot see how failure to do so renders the result invalid or to the conclusion that the result has been manipulated.
As repeatedly argued, what was to be uploaded onto a viewing portal, which is meant for the public, is only a scanned copy of a result already available to the party agent anyway. IReV was only an icing on the cake, already baked, meant to enhance transparency and optics around the process. The cake is already baked, the failure of the icing will not render it unbaked.
I think that, as usual, a lot of the fuss about the failure of BVAS comes from procedural illiteracy and desperation to hang on to just about anything to query an outcome that is contrary to the one many prefer.
Those who have been quite vociferous about a 'stolen mandate' should be excited about BVAS and even IReV. The results are on the portal. All they need to do is crosscheck what is found there with what they have from their agents. Needless to say that where discrepancy is found, precedence suggests that it will be found in their favour. Section 64 of the Electoral Act is there as cover.
BVAS comes in to help in convincing the courts to invalidate results from areas where overvoting can be established (Section 64b).
In other words, BVAS, apart from having already largely prevented voting by ghosts, which in part explains the 'poor turnout' and election loss by many members of the power elite and 'sitting Governors', the technology comes handy in helping those who might have been short-changed to seek redress.
Unfortunately, those who have benefited from the deployment of BVAS and are well positioned to further benefit, if they indeed have a case, are the ones that have been aiming darts at it, possibly out of confusion or ignorance, further miseducating their followers, including those one would expect to know better.