The Independent National Elec­toral Commission (INEC) on Tuesday said it will conduct mock accreditation nationwide ahead of the 2023 general elec­tions.
Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC Chairman, made the dis­closure while speaking at the Chatham House in London.
According to Yakubu, the mock accreditation would be car­ried out across selected polling units to ascertain the integrity of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), before the main elections begin in February.
He further stated that every BVAS machine deployed across the 774 local government areas had been tested, adding that the functionality of the machines was impressive.
Yakubu stated that back up machines have been readily pro­vided in case of system glitches, adding that with all preparations on ground, the commission is really “comfortable and happy.”
He said, “We have the machines for the 2023 elec­tions but we didn’t want to take chances. Each and ev­ery machine has been test­ed and confirmed function­al. For the last two weeks our officials were in the 36 states of the federation testing these machines, and the functionality is simply encouraging.
“The second thing we’re going to do, and pretty soon, is to conduct mock accredi­tation exercise nationwide ahead of the elections. We won’t wait until the main elections come, we will test the integrity of these ma­chines with real-life voters in selected polling units across the country.
“We did so in Ekiti and Osun, it was fantastic and we’re going to do so na­tionwide. Increasingly our people are becoming more excited about the deploy­ment of this technology and we’re really happy.
“Also in terms of the numbers of these BVAS ma­chines, we always make pro­vision in case of malfunction or glitches. There is always a backup. We have IReV tech­nical support that will fix the machines in the unlikely event of any glitches.
“However, where it fails to function completely in a polling unit, from previous experience there were iso­lated polling units, the law has a remedy that the com­mission should re-mobilise and re-conduct elections in the affected polling units within 24 hours, so we are really, really comfortable where we are.”