Dr Emmanuel Alex Hart who is the Independent National Electoral Commission’s Residence Electoral Commissioner (REC) in Bayelsa State has reiterated his earlier claims that there would be no going back on the deployment of the recently announced Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for voters accreditation and also for the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) in real-time on election day.
Similarly, it has also been announced that there would be no Incident Form that enables all the ineligible persons to vote using other people’s Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) during elections, he noted.
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He had also made the emphasis during a meeting on Thursday with political parties and other stakeholders at the Mahmood Yakubu Media Centre, INEC, Bayelsa State and 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.
“The Commission has completed the exercise to clean up the register and in the next few days, hard copies will be displayed in the 105 Registration Areas (Wards) and Eight (8) Local Government Areas in the State.”
The register will also be published on INEC’s website for claims and objections as required by law, he affirmed, while disclosing that the physical display of the register will take place at the registration areas (wards) from Saturday 12th to Friday 18th of November, 2022.
Hart further appealed to stakeholders to seize the opportunity of the display to scrutinize the list “and help us clean it further so that the final register of voters for the 2023 General Election can be compiled and published.”
He, however, noted that with Bayelsa State facing a critical challenge with flooding for the past six weeks, a number of the registration areas may still be inaccessible at the commencement of the display.