The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, says the Electoral Act does not mandate his commission to electronically transmit the 2023 presidential election results.
INEC made the submission in response to a petition by the Action Peoples Party (APP) before the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC) in Abuja.
The APP by its petition counters the outcome of the 2023 presidential election.
The APP approached the Tribunal to challenge the victory of the candidate of the APC, Bola Tinubu, in the February 25 election as declared by INEC.
To them, the electoral umpire failed to transmit results electronically and this contradicts the provision of the law.
The APP had alleged that INEC breached its own laws and guidelines.
The Electoral Act
INEC reacted through one of its lawyers, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN).
He insists that the 2023 presidential polls were free and fair.
INEC says the Electoral Act does not mandate the electronic transmission of results.
“The election was free, fair, credible and in compliance with the constitution.
“The election was also in compliance with 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.”
Why Results Were Not Uploaded
INEC also dismissed allegations that its officials doctored results to favour a particular political party’s candidate.
Furthermore, the commission insisted that there were no reports of over-voting.
According to INEC, the online result viewing portal had some challenges on election day and became erratic at the point of collation.
This forced the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) team to adopt an alternative while working to rectify the problem.
“It was observed that the result sheets were being successfully uploaded through the e-transmission system to the iRev portal.
“But, the e-transmission was not processing and uploading the result sheets to the iRev portal in respect of the presidential election.
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“The system was encountering glitches and was extremely slow.
“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,” the INEC said.
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Meanwhile, PEPC is yet to fix dates for the hearing of the five petitions received so far.
