Expert  Tasks  INEC On Urgent BVAS Upgrade

The Managing Director of New Horizons, Mr Tim Akano, has called on the Independent National Electoral Commission  (INEC) to urgently upgrade the Bimodal  Voter Accreditation System  (BVAS) ahead of the forthcoming polls.
Akano, who heads the computer training firm, made the call at the weekend in Lagos at the celebration of the World Data Privacy Day organised by Data and Knowledge Information Privacy Protection Initiative (DKIPPI).
The Tide source reports that the theme of the celebrations was  “Understanding Privacy and Online Risk in Digital World Today”.
He said regardless of the performance of BVAS in the next three weeks, there was a need for an urgent upgrade against the background of the over-voting recorded in the recent Osun governorship election.
“This will be the first time in the history of elections in Nigeria that the country would rely on wholesale technology to choose its next President. Will BVAS lead to a breakthrough or a breakdown of Nigeria even though BVAS end -to-end encryption security offers more than a kilogramme of comfort and confidence?”, he said.
Akano said more importantly, transmitting sensitive data using the GSM technology which BVAS depended on was not as water-tight as using the satellite technology.
He said that a reconfigured BVAS 2.0 would definitely be capable of identifying and automatically eliminating cases of over-voting from the source polling units using certain Artificial Intelligence technology.
According to him, it will also  save INEC from avoidable embarrassment of having to harmonise their data, as it happened in Osun with three results in one election.
He further noted that time was no more for the implementation of this reconfiguration before the February 23 presidential election but suffice to say that the technology to arrest over-voting by BVAS exists today.
“If the F-35 American fighter jet, the most sophisticated fighter jet in the world, can be hacked, BVAS is not absolute”, he said.
In his address, the Convener, Mr Tokunbo  Smith, expressed excitement  because many government institutions, corporate bodies and professional bodies have joined  in celebrating the World Data Privacy Day.
He said that DKIPPI had contributed and was still contributing to the development of Data Privacy and Protection in Nigeria.
Smith said that the desire of the initiative to create awareness on data privacy and educate the public on the importance of data privacy was already yielding positive results.