Photo: Prof Mahmoud Yakubu, INEC boss
Opinion: INEC‘s BVAS reconfiguration is an ICT aberration
By Engineer Dominic Datong
The Labour Party took the electoral umpire, INEC, to court over allegations of the wrong use of the BVAS machine during the Presidential elections of February 25, 2023.
The allegations were centered around the inability of the BVAS to upload the images of the polling unit level results to INEC portal which, the Labour Party said was a ploy to circumvent the process to give way for manipulation of results.
INEC had claimed technical issues with the platform. INEC also had sought the consent of the court to reconfigure the BVAS device which is in contention for the Governorship and State Assembly elections which was slated for 11th of February.
On the 8th of February, the court granted this request to INEC.
I have been in the IT world for a while and I find it very pedestrian for INEC to want to reconfigure a device loaded with an application developed specifically for elections that were known beforehand.
That calls to question if the electioneering application was actually engineered well at all. In a usual application development, requirements are gathered, thoroughly scrutinized for applicability and finally sent to the developers for development.
If this process was actually followed, I would wonder why the BVAS machine cannot handle elections twice in a row.
My understanding of the BVAS machine makes me think how simple the application could be. It is basically a counter.
It checks through a pre-loaded database of voters for the particular election in a certain polling unit and counts the number of voters that came for the particular election and uploads to the server the number of “accredited” voters.
An additional functionality is for the application to be able to upload a copy of the election result to a server, which in my opinion should not be more than 5 MB (High Resolution).
The upload of the results, according to INEC, was to enable the public to view polling unit level results as a mark of transparency of the process.
This failed, largely, particularly for the Presidential elections but worked well for the national assembly elections.
This raised suspicion of many on the possibility of a subversion of the agreed process.
BVAS, like any technology, could have technical issues, but there are some level of issues that would have been taken care of at the design stage of the technology.
That is why it is a technology. For example, a BVAS should be able to conduct multiple elections without the need for the machine to be reconfigured owing to the quantity and the geographical spread of the devices.
The ability of the machine to dump its content securely to a server somewhere on the internet while retaining its copy incase of failure or corruption of data. From indications, the device is not able to carry out some of these functions.
Due to the usual litigations that accompany elections in Nigeria, it should have been envisaged that there would be a possibility of having the next election while litigations were subsisting as is the case at the moment.
The application should have been designed to be able to carter for more than one election at a time as it was well known, upfront at design stages, that the device would be used for the next election.
In my view and if I was a part of the design of the application, I would just create a setup screen that would allow the electoral officer to select the current election from a list of eligible elections and then any accreditations and images should be contained within the application which can be referenced after the election.
I really wonder why the BVAS device needs a reconfiguration that would delete previous elections data. What are they reconfiguring?
The voter database is same, the polling units are the same and its just to select the type of election which can even be done automatically based on a predefined date.
For those that play car race games on their phones or computers, you will be familiar with choosing a racecourse with uniquely different scenery, choosing a car with different engine sounds etc.
Games such as these save progress of each chosen scenario. I expect such in a multi-million-dollar application meant for a national election or even better.
Is there a rat smelling or was the application not well articulated? Could there really be a way that the device can be tampered with after an image has been uploaded?
How safe are the accreditation data that are transmitted wirelessly to the server? There are too many questions to ask.
Let me laud INEC for providing an avenue for review of election results via the IREV portal but the processes around the transmission of the data was flawed.
Steps must be taken to ensure that the process is followed meticulously, subsequently to offer more credibility to the elections.
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Datong, Dominic Gwaman
Conflict, Security and Development Expert
[email protected]
