No going back on BVAS, IReV – INEC

By Adeleye Kunle

The Independent National Electoral Commission’s Residence Electoral Commissioner (REC) in Bayelsa State, Dr Emmanuel Alex Hart has stressed that there is no going back on the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for voters accreditation and also the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) in real-time on election day.

Similarly, there will be no Incident Form that enables ineligible persons to vote using other people’s Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) during elections, he noted.

He made the emphasis during a meeting on Thursday with political parties and other stakeholders at the Mahmood Yakubu Media Centre, INEC, Bayelsa State.

Dr. Hart, said the foundation for credible election is the Voters’ Register, noting that before now the Commission commenced an update of the Voter Register during the CVR which started on 28th June 2021 and was suspended on 31st July 2022.

His words: “I wish to remind you all about the initial outcome of the statistics of voter registration for Bayelsa State when the Automated Biometric Identification System was used to clean up from 28th June 2021 to 14th January 2022.

“Out of a total of 132,628 persons that completed registration, only 43,678 were valid and 88,950 invalid. Invalid registration for that period was 67.1%. The reasons were double/multiple registrations, underage registration and outright fake registrations