On Monday, the Independent National Electoral Commission called its first and only witness, Lawrence Bayode, to appear before the Presidential Election Petition Court.
The commission is responding to the petition made by the Peoples Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, after the February 25 presidential elections, which gave Bola Tinubu the job of president.
The petitioners are asking questions about how the election was run by the electoral board.
The court said INEC could start its case on July 3.
During the hearing, the court accepted as evidence the final report of the European Union Election Observer Mission on how the presidential election was run.
The report, which was given by Atiku’s lawyer, Chris Uche, SAN, through a witness, said that only 31% of the presidential election results were uploaded to INEC’s result viewing site.
In his evidence-in-chief, the INEC witness agreed that the presiding officers of the electoral body had to do the manual work of adding up the results of the presidential election.
He said that the electoral body doesn’t have an electronic method for putting together election results, so the presidential election result was not put together electronically.
Under questioning from Uche, SAN, the witness admitted that not all of the presidential election results had been uploaded to the IRev as of March 1, 2023, when Tinubu was announced as the winner of the election.
He said that there was a problem with the uploading of the presidential election data that was not reported to Amazon Web Services by the commission.
During cross-examination by the president’s lawyer, Wole Olanipekun, SAN, he said that the images captured by the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System, whether they are sent electronically or by hand, will not affect the reliability of the election, particularly when the results are announced to the hearing and knowledge of party agents.
He said that the result of the February 25 presidential election was free, fair, clear, and mostly in line with the law.
After its witness was questioned and then cross-examined, INEC gave four documents to help its case.
The commission then ended its defence of the petition brought by the PDP and Atiku against Tinubu being named president.
After this, the court, led by Justice Harunna Tsammani, told the president to start his case to defend his victory in the presidential election.
Teejanyy (
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