2023 Election: INEC ICT Director Fails To Mention Tinubu’s Scores On IREV Result Portal During Obi’s Interrogation

At the Presidential Election Petitions Court sitting in Abuja on Tuesday, the Deputy Director in the ICT Department of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Dr. Lawrence Bayode, was cross-examined by the legal team of the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, over his claim that the “technical glitches” experienced with the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) on election day was eventually resolved by his team.

At the proceedings, Bayode was presented with several INEC Form EC8As (polling units) downloaded from the IReV portal and certified by the electoral umpire, and was told by Obi’s lawyer, P.I.N Ikweto SAN to read out the scores of the All Progressives Congress candidate.

The witness who was fielded by INEC, said he could not read out the scores because they were blurred.

Before he started testifying, the INEC counsel, A.B. Mahmoud SAN, tendered some documents listed as 1,2, 3, 4 and 7 on his schedule of documents.

The documents he sought to tender were Certified True copies of the APC letter dated 6th July 2022 and acknowledged by INEC on 13th of July, CTC of Bola Tinubu’s letter dated July 6 and CTC of INEC Regulations and Guidelines for the conduct of Election 2022.

Others were CTC of INEC Manual for Election Officials, 2023 and CTC of INEC letter dated 10th March with approved procedure for Issuance of CTC of documents attached.

The witness, through Mahmoud, also tendered Amazon Web Services cloud trail logs on INEC’s E-transmission system/IREV portal.

He explained to the court that the “cloud trail log” are obtained from INEC’s account on Amazon Web Services (the cloud platform on which IREV application was hosted by INEC) and it shows the activity of the patches that were deployed on the e-transmission application on AWS to fix the glitches that the electoral umpire alleged to have encountered on its IREV application on election day.

The court admitted the documents while noting the objections raised by Obi’s team.

Under cross-examination by Tinubu and Kashim Shettima’s lawyer, Wole Olanipekun SAN, the witness said the blurred results downloaded from IREV portal, as alleged by Obi, did not affect physical results recorded in Form EC8A at polling units.

Recall that Obi is alleging that 18,088 polling unit results downloaded from IREV were blurred and amounted to about 2.5 million potential votes for him.

But the witness said Olanipekun, Tinubu’s lawyer, was right to say that the images uploaded on IREV are not relevant for collation of results.

He said he was aware that the E-Naira application launched by the federal government on October 18, 2021 has not been activated due to technological issues.

Replying Olanipekun’s question on what amounts to completion of an electoral process, Bayode explained that election is practically completed when presiding officers record votes on Form EC8A, announce them, give party agents to sign on it and then snap the Form EC8A and upload on the IREV.

However, Olanipekun was seen trying to stop the INEC witness from talking about snapping of results as part of the electoral process.

Under cross-examination by lead counsel of the All Progressives Congress, Lateef Fagbemi SAN, the witness maintained that the Form EC8A was the primary source of INEC’s collation of results.

He said if what was downloaded from IREV is not clear, the physical results can also be obtained.

During interrogation by Obi’s lawyer, Ikweto SAN, Bayode said INEC’s e-transmission application was tested before it was deployed and the testing of the e-transmission application was done on 4th of February.

Ikweto then tendered the INEC e-transmission document testing report dated February 22 as evidence and it was admitted as Peter Obi’s exhibits by the court.

Under further questioning from Ikweto, the witness said “The (INEC) e-transmission server was not vulnerable.”

He agreed that the AWS cloud trail log will contain the following features: Invent time, Invent source, Invent name, AWS region, Resource IP Address and Identity Access Management Address.

He was asked to explain if Form EC8A that is snapped on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines and uploaded on IREV portal can be corrupted.

“Anything can happen when you are sending the image to IRev,” Bayode replied.

“Will it alter the content on Form EC8A?,” Ikweto asked again, to which the witness said “no”.

The witness was then handed several INEC CTCs of Results downloaded from IREV portal and was told by Ikweto to mention the scores of APC in those documents.

The witness could not answer but said the documents are blurred but could not have affected the final results.

The witness also admit that some INEC press releases and documents are archived.

Speaking further, the witness clarified that “functionality test” is to test if the system is working; “performance test” is to test how the system will behave under heavy load of users while “Vulnerability test” is a testing on the backend to ensure that the system is secured.

After his testimony, INEC lawyer, Mahmoud, closed his defense in Peter Obi’s petition which seeks nullification of Tinubu’s victory.

Olanipekun told the court that he will open his defense on Wednesday.

“This matter is adjourned to Wednesday for opening of defense of Tinubu and APC,” the five-man panel of the court led by Justice Haruna Tsammani held.