In its decision on Friday, the court had granted the directives allowing Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi access to the confidential information utilized in the election’s administration.
Atiku, the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) presidential candidate, and Mr. Obi, his Labour Party (LP) opponent in the hotly disputed election, had sought the order in anticipation of contesting the results.
According to the INEC results released on March 1st, Mr. Tinubu received 8.8 million votes, defeating both Mr. Atiku and Mr. Obi.
However, the pair, who came in second to Bola Tinubu, the president-elect and presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has accused electoral officials of fraud.
They subsequently submitted separate ex parte papers, pleading for permission to inspect private information used by INEC to conduct the presidential election.
Last Friday, the appellate court approved Atiku and Mr. Obi’s demands to check the voting equipment, including the BVAS machines among others.
According to rumors, the Court of Appeal serves as the Presidential Election Petition Court, where disappointed candidates can appeal the results of presidential elections.
But, the reporter was able to confirm at the court’s register that the electoral umpire had requested a modification of its order from the previous day.
The application asks the court to issue a directive allowing it to alter its BVAS machines for the state legislature and governorship elections on March 11.
INEC might request a modification of its instructions, according to a report published on Monday by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
BVAS will need to be reconfigured in order to conduct the election, which would take place in all 36 states of the federation with the exception of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, according to a reliable source within the commission cited by NAN.
The electoral umpire indicated that in order to deploy the BVAS machines to polling locations for Saturday’s election, they would need to be reconfigured for the 11 March elections from the 25 February polls.
“The commission’s Legal Department is actually preparing an application to be filled in the court on Monday to seek an order for it to reconfigure its BVAS for Saturday Governorship and State Houses of Assembly election,” the reporter said.
According to the source, INEC needed to reconfigure the BVAS utilized for the 25 February elections and deploy them to polling locations for the Saturday election because of the amount of BVAS needed to conduct the election across states.
The source further stated that INEC’s technical team needed to be deployed promptly to start the device’s re-configuration, which they claimed would be done one at a time.
According to the source, the directive is crucial if the scheduled gubernatorial and state House of Assembly elections on Saturday are to go off without a hitch.
The Labour Party’s Peter Obi and the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar were given permission to see all the sensitive papers used by INEC to conduct the presidential election on February 25 by the Court of Appeal in Abuja on Friday, NAN recalls.
After hearing two separate ex parte applications that the two disgruntled presidential candidates filed alongside their political parties, an appellate court bench chaired by Joseph Ikyegh issued the ruling.
In order to support their petitions challenging the results of the presidential election, the applicants specifically asked the court to order INEC to provide them access to the records it utilized for the presidential election.
“An order allowing the applicants permission to electronically scan and make photocopies of voter registration and ballot papers used in the Federal Republic of Nigeria’s February 25 presidential election.
“An order granting leave to the applicants to carry out Digital Forensic Inspection of BVAS machines used for the conduct of the Feb. 25 election for the Office of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”
Also, the plaintiffs requested a court injunction preventing INEC “from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until the proper examination was done and Certified True Copies of them provided”.
In its ruling, the court directed INEC to permit the applicants to see all of the voting equipment used to conduct the presidential election.
The court gave the appellants permission to electronically scan and/or copy the voter registration and ballot papers used in the presidential election.
The court ordered that leave is thus given to the petitioners to conduct Digital Forensic Examination of BVAS machines utilized for the conduct of the 25 February 2023 election for the office of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.