The Osun state resident electoral commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Dr. Mutiu Agboke, has disclosed that the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS), has helped the commission to expose overvoting in the July 16, 2022 governorship election in the state.
He said the commission has learned enough lessons on how the BVAS machine could be manipulated, saying there is no going back on the usage in the coming general elections.
Agboke who spoke at a meeting with party chairmen in Osogbo on the coming mock accreditation, Wednesday, said the commission introduced BVAS for the sanctity of accreditation and the election process.
He said, “some individuals were surreptitiously procured by the political class to bypass the BVAS. Once you bypass the BVAS and go and collect the ballot paper, there must be over-voting.
“Another possibility is where our staff, be it ad-hoc or permanent, in connivance with this fraudulent electorate deliberately allow people to bypass the BVAS and they are given ballot paper to vote.
“So I want to tell Osun people that the issue of overvoting was not orchestrated by BVAS. We did not use BVAS to vote or cast our ballot. Our ballot was manual voting. Over-voting was caused by fraudulent people that came to vote in the election. They are criminally minded.
“Let us stop all these blame games on INEC, let us open our eyes very well on the election. Watch out for our staff who may want to connive with politicians. We must all own the process together,” he added.
In a video obtained by our correspondent, the REC who spoke at the palace of Oluwo of Iwoland, Tuesday, said “the politicians in connivance with our staff deliberately bypass the BVAS. It was this BVAS that exposed overvoting during Osun Election.
“So with this judgment of the tribunal, we have known how overvoting can happen, we are going to beam our searchlight on those staff and I can assure you that all of us should own the process together. This is the way we can correct this anomaly,” he added.
