Tribunal: INEC Counters Peter Obi’s Petition Against Tinubu, Defends Collation Of 2023 Presidential Poll

The Independent National Electoral Commission has asked the Presidential Election Petition Court sitting in Abuja to dismiss the petition filed against the 2023 presidential election by the Labour Party flagbearer, Peter Obi, insisting that it collated the results that produced Bola Tinubu of the All Progressive Congress as president-elect in line with electoral guidelines.

Recall that Obi’s legal team had on March 20, 2023, filed a number of grounds why the Presidential Election Petition Court should nullify the declaration of the candidate of the APC.

Among the grounds he canvassed is that the election of Tinubu was allegedly based on corrupt practices or non-compliance with the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022 because INEC made the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machine mandatory for the accreditation of voters and immediate uploading of results but failed to use it on election day, contrary to laws and regulations contained in its “Regulations and Guidelines for the conduct of Elections 2022” and the “Manual for Election Officials 2023”.

But in INEC’s objection filed by A.B Mahmoud SAN, the electoral umpire contended that while it is true that collation officers are required to ascertain that the number of accredited voter corresponds with the number captured in the BVAS and that the votes of parties correspond with the result electronically transmitted directly from the polling units before collation of results, it is required of the collation officers to use INEC’s copy of the results from the polling unit in the event that no results have been electronically transmitted from a polling unit.

“Where that does not also exist, the collation officer shall request for the duplicate hard copies issued to the Nigerian Police Force and agents of political parties in that order,” he stated.

He argued that state collation officers are not required by INEC guidelines to electronically transmit results from states to the national collation center but that officials are entitled to use “duplicate hard copies of results issued by it to NPF and agents of political parties.”

On his part,Deputy Director, ICT Department of INEC, Dr. Lawrence Bayode, alleged in INEC’s objection that Polling Unit results were duly uploaded on the electoral umpire’s e-transmission system by the respective Presiding Officers at the end of the election but the Presidential election results of 25 February 2023 at some point were not visible on the INEC Result Viewing Portal, IReV due to a technical glitch experienced on the election day.

‘Whilst the e-Transmission is the core Portal that receives the result from the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for each Polling Unit, the IReV is the public-facing end of the result transmission system.

He claimed that while officials were using the BVAS, there was temporary failure of communication between the e-transmission system and the IReV portal for the Presidential election.

“In this regard, the e-transmission system returned an HTTP 500 error which is an application error such that the transmitted results though received on the e-transmission application hosted on the AWS, the e-transmission could not organize and push the results instantly to the Presidential module on the IRev portal because it could not map the results uploaded for the Presidential election to any State.

“The technical glitch did not in any way affect the result of the election. Upon resolution of the HTTP 500 error, the results which were delayed in the e-transmission system were eventually organized and pushed to the IReV portal. The results are available as generated in their original form from the Polling Units using the BVAS. The results of the election as uploaded on the IReV portal are readable and reflect the lawful scores of all the candidates at the election,” Bayode said.

The electoral umpire urged the Tribunal to dismiss Obi’s petition for being an abuse of the court process.