Kimpact Development Initiative (KDI), a civil society organisation (CSO), says its preliminary data gathered from the Osun governorship election indicated an 84.7 per cent success rate of the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS).
The high stakes poll held on Saturday involved 15 candidates including Ademola Adeleke, the state governor.
KDI said it deployed 370 trained and accredited observers across all 30 LGAs, 332 wards, and 1660 polling units in Osun.
In a statement, KDI said its observers monitored the functionality and use of the BVAS, with particular attention to authentication success, processing time, technical difficulties, and the operational effect of device performance on voter accreditation.
The CSO said preliminary data indicated a BVAS success rate of 84.7 per cent, compared with a 15.3 per cent failure rate among the accreditation attempts captured by the monitoring system.
“The data also shows variation in the time required to accredit voters. Of the accreditation time observed, BVAS accredited voters in a record time between one and two minutes. This suggests that although BVAS was functioning successfully in a substantial majority of observed cases, the experience was not uniform across polling locations,” the statement reads.
“BVAS-related challenges were particularly concentrated in Ifedayo, Ife North, Osogbo, Ayedaade, Irepodun, Iwo and Egbedore, which recorded the highest number of reported BVAS failure observations in the EDDR at the time of this statement. The implication is that BVAS performance is emerging as an important operational variable in the early conduct of the election.”
‘REDUCED VIOLENCE’
KDI said it recorded three violence-related incidents from Ife East and Ejigbo LGA where political thugs reportedly invaded the polling unit, chased voters away and snatched election materials, disrupting the voting process.
In Ife East, police officers allegedly invaded a RAC and fired tear gas to disrupt the distribution of election materials, while in Ilesa West LGA, political thugs disrupted a unit and chased away voters.
However, KDI said the incidents differed from the more elevated level of violence recorded during the pre-election period.
“KDI’s pre-election monitoring recorded 81 election-related violence incidents resulting in 15 fatalities between October 2025 and August 2026. The minute number of verified election-day violence reports received by the 12:00 pm cut-off is therefore encouraging,” the statement said.
The CSO said it would continue to monitor both the occurrence of incidents and the conduct and responsiveness of security agencies throughout the remainder of the electoral process.
COURTESY: TheCable
