The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has given reasons why it decided to postpone the March 11 gubernatorial and state house of assembly elections.
Citing logistics challenges, INEC announced March 18 for the elections to hold.
According to the electoral body, this will allow more time for voting machines used in last month’s presidential and legislative elections to be reconfigured and deployed for the upcoming vote, said Festus Okoye, a spokesman for Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, in a statement.
Ahead of the gubernatorial election, a court on Wednesday approved the electoral body’s request to reset the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, or BVAS machines — part of new technologies heavily used this year’s elections to make them more transparent.
However, that court ruling came “far too late” for the machines to be reset in time for use in the March 11 election, forcing a one-week extension in the date, the electoral body said.
“This decision has not been taken lightly but it is necessary to ensure that there is adequate time to back up the data stored on the over 176,000 BVAS machines from the Presidential and National Assembly elections” and reconfigure them for the coming elections, said Okoye, the electoral body’s spokesman.