The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says electronic collation of election results is not mandatory.
The Commission said this response to a petition by the Action Peoples Party (APP) before the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC) in Abuja.
The APP, in its petition before the court, is challenging the result of the 2023 presidential election, which declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the February 25 polls. The party alleged substantial non-compliance with the Electoral Act 2022 as well as a breach of INEC guidelines.
INEC, through one of its lawyers, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN), dismissed the party’s argument that results collation was to be done electronically, citing paragraphs 50 to 55 of the regulations and guidelines for the conduct of the 2023 presidential election.
“The election was free, fair, credible and in compliance with the constitution and the Electoral Act, 2022 and other relevant laws and guidelines.
“There was no collation system of the 3rd respondent (INEC) to which polling unit results were required to be transmitted by the presiding officers… the prescribed mode of collation was manual collation of the various forms EC8A, EC8B, EC8C, EC8D and EC8E in the presidential election,” the electoral umpire stated in its defence.
It further stated that its online result viewing portal became erratic at the point of collation and members of its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) team were called in to rectify the problem, the reason the presidential results were not immediately uploaded.
The Commission dismissed the allegation that its officials doctored results to favour a particular political party’s candidate or that there was over-voting.
“The 3rd respondent’s (INEC) technical team took every step to restore the application to functionality… five application/patches updates were created and deployed immediately with the aim of fixing the error,” INEC said in its court filing.
INEC said it will tender, in evidence, the report of its ICT department during the tribunal hearing with two witnesses, who are INEC officials for further clarity.
Meanwhile, INEC has asked the PEPC to dismiss a petition filed by Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi.
The Commission stated this in its reply filed on Monday night, at the PEPC’s Secretariat by its lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN).
The Commission prayed the court to either “dismiss or strike out the petition for being grossly incompetent, abusive, vague, nebulous, generic, general, non-specific, ambiguous, equivocal, hypothetical and academic.”
Obi, the 1st petitioner, and LP, the 2nd petitioner, had sued INEC, Bola Tinubu, Sen. Kashim Shettima and All Progressives Congress (APC) as 1st to 4th respondents respectively.
The petition marked: CA/PEPC/03/2023 filed by Obi and LP’s lead counsel, Livy Ozoukwu, contended that Tinubu “was not duly elected by majority of the lawful votes cast at the time of the election.”
They claimed there was rigging in 11 states, adding that they would demonstrate this in the declaration of results based on the uploaded results.
They said INEC violated its own regulations when it announced the result despite the fact that at the time of the announcement, the totality of the polling unit results had yet to be fully scanned, uploaded and transmitted electronically as required by the Electoral Act, among others.
