NEWS: INEC moves forward the dates for the governorship and state assembly elections to March 18.

According to a representative, Nigeria's Independent National Election Commission has delayed the country's March 11 gubernatorial election due to logistical difficulties.

The March 11 gubernatorial election in Nigeria has been delayed, according to an official announcement made late Wednesday. The reason given was logistical difficulties.

New governor elections for 28 of Nigeria's 36 states will take place on March 18. Festus Okoye, a spokesperson for Nigeria's Independent National Election Commission, said in a statement that the move will give extra time for the reconfiguration and deployment of voting machines used in last month's presidential and legislative elections.

The governor election is a part of Nigeria's general elections for important political offices with four-year mandates, which also included Bola Tinubu of the ruling party's victory in the presidential vote last month. The opposition is contesting the result.

A local court on Wednesday granted the electoral body's request to reset the BVAS machines, one of the new technologies largely employed this year in Nigeria elections to increase their transparency, ahead of the gubernatorial vote.

The electoral board claimed that the court decision was "far too late" for the machines to be reset in time for the March 11 poll, necessitating a one-week postponement.

The electoral body's spokesman, Okoye, said the decision "has not been made 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 upcoming elections.

The election commission has come under fire from observer organizations for the technology issues that compromised the presidential vote. These errors have emerged as a key point of contention in the numerous complaints made by the opposition over the ruling party's victory in the presidential election.

The two main opposition parties have claimed that the electoral board did not follow its own procedures and the nation's own election regulations when declaring a winner and that the errors left possibility for ballots to be tampered with. Atiku Abubakar, the second-place finisher, is demanding for the presidential election to be canceled, while Peter Obi, the third-place finisher, has asserted that he has proof he won the presidential election.