BVAS: Demystifying the use of technology in interrogating the presidential election results

On February 25, 2023, the world watched as Nigeria, the globally styled ‘‘Giant of Africa’’, rolled out its democratic machinery to elect a new government.

The widespread use of a fairly novel technology at the polling units; the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System or “BVAS” promised to be a game-changer. This technology was introduced to curb the incessant electoral malpractices experienced in previous elections.

Some may not be aware that the BVAS was piloted in the 2021 Delta State by-election for the Isoko South 1 State Constituency: then later that same year in Anambra State. INEC’s confidence in its deployment during the pilot phase, undeniably set the stage for incorporating BVAS into the 2023 general elections.

What you need to know about the BVAS

The BVAS is a multifunctional device that performs an array of functions, including voter enrolment or registration, facial and fingerprint verification at the polling units, and allowing election result sheets to be uploaded to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).

The BVAS combines Smart Card Reader features, and the Z-Pad functionality into one device. Smart Card Readers are commonly used in a variety of settings requiring stringent electronic authentication, such as in financial transactions and more recently in elections. The BVAS has an electronic sensor that reads a magnetic strip or bar code on a Permanent Voter’s Card.

Simply put, during voter accreditation, the Smart Card Reader corroborates that each voter’s fingerprint directly matches the same unique fingerprint provided for enrolment. The Z-Pad then adds a camera feature for real-time facial data capture.

The voter’s live photo on election day, is verified from the database of registered voters. These technological features combined, provide on-the-spot verification of voters with a wait-time of less than a minute.

After accreditation, the first stage of the voting process, voters move on to the next queue to cast their ballots. This is an extremely sensitive stage as the polling officer must exercise extreme care to ensure that only accredited voters move on to cast their ballots.

Additional physical checks are therefore put in place to this end; including marking of each voter’s thumb with ink, which must then be shown before voting is permitted. All of this, strengthens the integrity of the accreditation, and eventually the voting process. The impacts of this process, or rather a failure to observe the process, will be explored in more detail later on.

When voting is completed, the Presiding officer counts the votes and publicly announces the results for all present at the polling station. The Presiding Officer then fills in the results in a result sheet known as EC8A. The result sheet is to be scanned and uploaded by the BVAS to IReV, which is accessible to the public.

Interplay between the Electoral Act, INEC Regulations, and BVAS

The Electoral Act 2022 (“the Act”) governs electoral processes throughout Nigeria. The Act empowers INEC to issue regulations and guidelines to give effect to its objectives (Section 146 of the Electoral Act). Further to this mandate, INEC issued the Regulations and Guidelines for the Conduct of Elections, 2022 (“the Regulations”), prescribing the procedures for conducting elections and the role of BVAS.
Clause 19 of the Regulations gives effect to Section 47 of the Electoral Act, mandating the use of the BVAS to accredit voters at the polling unit.

This process is contemplated to be completed expeditiously unless there are issues identifying the voter. There are two possible technological scenarios for the BVAS to implement the rapid voter authentication previously described.

The first is that the BVAS would rely on an internal storage capacity to access the list of registered voters; already stored offline, without engaging the internet. This contemplates that INEC preloads a dataset of registered voters into the BVAS.

With this in place, the BVAS will have no issues quickly identifying voters from the embedded data list. The second, internet-based, process would prove much more controversial and challenging to implement.

Whichever protocol is followed for accreditation, the combined physical and technological verification underscore the overwhelming importance of securing the transition from accreditation to actual voting.

The results at each polling unit hinge on the polling officers’ hypervigilance at this stage. Should there be more votes than accredited voters at a given polling unit, the entire votes at the polling unit are cancelled.

Obviously, this tactic can be utilized by agents of the opposition in known strongholds of their opponents – to ensure that otherwise legitimately cast votes are invalidated.

The Act provides that the presiding officer shall transfer both the results and the total number of accredited voters in a manner prescribed by INEC. The Regulations breathe life into this provision, by stipulating that the results at the polling units should be “…electronically transmitted or transferred…” to the collation centre.

Therefore, upon completion of voting and result procedures, the presiding officer shall ensure that the results of each polling unit are electronically transmitted or transferred to INEC’s collation system. Concurrently, the results written in the result sheet will be manually scanned and uploaded by the BVAS to IReV (Section 60(5) of the Electoral Act ).

This offers a simple yet brilliant solution to the sole reliance on the collation of votes at the ward collation centre, recorded on the ward level EC8B – a process that, in the past, opened up the path for tampering and ballot snatching.

With the current system in place, the results automatically uploaded at the polling station, are deemed to be the conclusive results thus rendering any subsequent attempts to snatch or tamper with the ballots cast, obsolete. In other words, any discrepancy between the documents electronically transmitted, and the physical documents transmitted to the ward collation centre will be resolved in favour of the former.

BVAS rendered obsolete – electoral history repeats itself

These simple innovations of the Act and Regulations became an uphill battle at most polling units across the country, as many presiding officers decried their inability to either electronically transmit the election results to the collation centres, or upload the result sheets to IReV.

In many cases, sole reliance was therefore returned to the physical records manually recorded and transported to collation centres – representing a reversion to the status quo, prior to the commendable innovations of the Act.

Suffice it to say, INEC’s failure to ensure the electronic transmission of voter information has again reignited the flames of distrust in the electoral process and gives impetus to the coming contests before the Election Tribunals.

In response, INEC leadership appears to have taken the position that, per Section 38 of the Regulations which state, “…the Presiding Officer shall electronically transmit or transfer the result of the polling unit, directly to the collation system as prescribed by the Commission” [emphasis supplied] the Commission retains the discretion to deploy non-electronic means of transmitting results – albeit thereby reversing the innovations of the Act.

A similar sentiment is offered by the Senate leadership, suggesting that the Act only provides for accreditation by BVAS, with no express mention of transmission by BVAS – therefore rendering as dispensable, the electronic transmission, which marks the departure from the previous fraught system to a more enhanced and secure way of authenticating and transmitting votes cast. This self-serving interpretation is wanting on a number of fronts.

The answers lie within…BVAS as data repository, even without transmission

In the wake of its inability to upload election results in a timely manner, INEC canvassed the problem of server downtime.

This would still not explain complaints made about discrepancies between the results recorded at the polling units, and those collated at the collating centres. However, even if server downtime is conceded as a legitimate issue, the BVAS should still be capable of serving as an offline storage unit for the original results counted and uploaded at the polling units.

Much like an email account stores draft messages. Importantly, the BVAS itself can thus be requested and used as evidence by the petitioner in an election petition. The courts are going to be busy.

Read also: Ordeals in INEC’s BVAS, IReV unite Atiku, Obi

Conclusion

With 176,663 polling units, and more than 8,000 area collation centres involved in the just concluded presidential election, a petitioner’s potentially mammoth evidentiary burden can be daunting. An onus reversal to INEC to show that reliance on physical collation did not compromise electoral integrity, would lessen the petitioners’ burden.

The electoral tribunal is afforded 180 days from the day a suit is filed, to deliver its judgment. Precedence is established in the Osun state election petition that when there is an inconsistency between manually collated voting materials and the material/results stored in INEC’s servers, reliance must be placed on the servers and not the manual documents.

More progressive jurisprudence is required at this critical moment in the nation’s history. Our electoral institutions must not; either through apathy, incompetence, or connivance, allow themselves to become the tool to regress the technological advancements contemplated by the Act to provide a freer and fairer electoral process.

Indeed, INEC may yet consider improving on its technology by adopting Blockchain technology. This is a revolutionary technology that is changing the way data is stored and processed. By this method, all computers are connected without a server. But for the cost, this must be the way forward for an institution that may require such technology to re-establish its reputation.