BVAS will be turned off from the back end, when snatched

With less than 16 days until the general elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission has guaranteed that the Bimodal Voter Registration System cannot be rigged.

On Wednesday, the special election program The 2023 Verdict on Channels Television featured Lawrence Bayode, INEC’s deputy director of information and communications technology.

Elections have in the past been marred by hoodlum violence and ballot box snatching.

Bayode claims that the BVAS will be turned off from the back end so that whoever stole the device on election day won’t be able to tamper with the results.
We have a system in place that can deactivate a specific BVAS if it is stolen, he said.

Because the device automatically pushes the accreditation data without the operator pressing a button, we deactivate it so that whoever steals it cannot do anything with it. The accreditation data is sent to the back-end when it is not in use.

The polling unit officer will report the incident, according to Bayode, if thugs take the device to other locations where they believe they can manipulate the data on the device.

“If such a thing occurs, the PO reports and from the back-end, that device is deactivated so that the person who took that device away will not be able to do anything with the device,” he said.