The Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) on Thursday denied having a server where the
results of the February 23 presidential election were uploaded.
INEC stated this position at the
ongoing Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal in Abuja .
The Peoples Democratic Party
(PDP) and its candidate, Atiku Abubakar, are challenging the declaration of
President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner
of the election.
The petitioners claimed that the
results they obtained from the INEC server indicated that Mr Abubakar won the
poll with an over six million votes margin.
Through their lawyers led by Levy
Uzoukwu, the PDP and Mr Abubakar asked the tribunal to compel INEC to grant
them access to the server and smart card readers used in the conduct of the
election.
But counsel representing INEC,
Yunus Usman, in a counter affidavit asked the court to dismiss the application.
“They are asking us to bring
something we do not have,” Mr Usman said.
He further drew the attention of
the tribunal to its judgment on March 6 granting PDP access to inspect only
election materials without the server.
The counsel to President
Muhammadu Buhari, Wole Olanipekun, and the All Progressives Congress (APC),
Lateef Fagnemi, on their part both asked the court to dismiss the application
for failing to disclose the existence of the server.
Mr Abubakar had said that results
from the INEC server showed that he scored 18,356,732 votes as against
16,741,430 votes by Mr Buhari. INEC had through manual collation announced
President Buhari winner of the election with 15,191,847 votes with Mr Abubakar polling
11, 262,978 votes.
“The servers from which the said
figures were derived belong to the first Respondent (INEC). The figures and
votes were transmitted to the first Respondent’s Presidential Result’s Server 1
and thereafter aggregated in INEC_PRES_RSLT_SRV2019, whose Physical Address or
unique Mac Address is 94-57-A5-DC-64-B9 with Microsoft Product ID
00252-7000000000-AA535. The above descriptions are unique to the first
Respondent’s Server,” Mr Abubakar and his party said.
“There is no conjecture in the
votes and scores in the table pleaded by the petitioners. The figures are
factual.”
“The spokesperson for the second
Respondent’s Campaign Organization openly admitted that the data in question
was in the first Respondent’s Server when he wrote and submitted a petition to
the Inspector-General of Police and the Director-General of the Department of
State Services (DSS) asking the Security agencies to investigate the 2nd
Petitioner herein for allegedly hacking into the Server of the first Respondent
and obtaining the data in question.
“Specifically, Festus Keyamo,
SAN, the spokesperson of the second Respondent claimed in the said petition
that it was the first Petitioner who smuggled the data into the Server.”
Mr Abubakar and the PDP also
alleged that the INEC chairman “committed grave errors in the final collation
exercise” for the election by “falsely crediting” some persons with political
parties, including “Okotie Christopher, Reverend Dr Onwubuya and Ojinika Jeff
Chinze.”
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