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Some politicians are trying to hack the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) hardware and gain access to the electoral digital infrastructure, but the system remains secure and robust against attacks, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has revealed.
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According to INEC’s Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, on Channels Television this week,“There are some politicians who want us to open the brain of the BVAS [machine] so they can see inside the BVAS [machine], to see how it functions and for them to also see whether there’s a possibility for them to clone it or manipulate it and the commission will not do that.”
INEC is deploying the BVAS machines nationwide for the national elections holding 25th of February and 11th of March.
The electoral umpire said it has recorded a number of attempted hits against its servers all of which were effectively curtailed by its technical team.
“I want to say again that we have done everything to ensure that the BVAS is not compromised. The data on the BVAS will be secured. After the poll, when the data is transmitted to our backend server, the data in transit will be secured and by the time the data gets to our backend server, the data will also be secured there.”
He assured that INEC has put in place measures to secure the entire process even as he urged Nigerians to have faith in the BVAS.
“Our BVAS is a very robust gadget – a very robust instrument, and we have faith in it. We believe it is the ultimate arbiter in terms of those who want to manipulate the process. I think that Nigerians should have faith in the BVAS. It is robust and will be a game-changer in the 2023 general elections,”
Adding: “Democracy can only be protected by a vigilant people and the law has given the political parties the power and the right to deploy their polling agents to all the polling units in Nigeria and to all the collation centres.”
