April 11, (THEWILL)- The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said 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.
In its notice of preliminary objection, INEC argued that the grounds on which the petition was based were defective, having regard to the vague and imprecise averments supporting the said grounds.
It said that the ground of the petitioners bordering on non-compliance with the provisions of the Electoral Act, 2022 and corrupt practices did not disclose a reasonable cause of action for failure to plead specific particulars and figures as to how the alleged non-compliance complained of substantially affected the results of the election.
It said in view of the above argument, “Prayers 3, 5(i) and 5(11) of the petition predicated on the ground of non-compliance in Paragraph 20(11) of the petition are ungrantable.”
It further said that the ground of the petition that Tinubu was not elected by majority of lawful votes cast as contained in Paragraph 20(iii) of the petition was defective for failure to plead the alleged unlawful votes to be deducted and/or lawful votes to be credited to the petitioners.
INEC argued that the petitioners’ prayer to declare that Obi scored majority of lawful votes cast at the election and be declared winner was defective for failure to join necessary parties and for lack of requisite particulars and pleading to support same.
The Commission said that though Obi was a candidate at the election, it, however, disagreed that he has a right to be returned as elected, “not having polled majority of the lawful votes cast at the election and /or secured one-quarter of the votes cast at the election in each of at least two-thirds of all states in the federation and the FCT.”
The Commission said all political parties intending to sponsor candidates in the election were required to submit lists of their agents and they were expected to observe the election process at their units and sign and collect result sheets on behalf of their political parties at the close of polls.
It argued that some of the political party agents whose names were on the list submitted to it were, however, absent at their polling units while some others, who were present, neglected to participate in the election process.
According to INEC, the petitioners (Obi and LP) did not have polling agents in all the polling units across Nigeria as they only submitted a list of 134,874 polling agents, which are 41,972 short of the 176,846 polling units across Nigeria.
It disagreed with the petitioners, insisting that they were not represented in many or some of the polling units in the country.
The Commission argued that while Shettima, the Vice President-elect, was duly nominated and sponsored to contest the election, it also said that Tinubu and Shettima were duly declared and returned as elected and issued Certificates of Return having fulfilled the requirements of the constitution to be declared winners and returned.
The dates for the hearing of the five petitions so far received from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party (LP), APP, Action Alliance (AA) and the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) are yet to be fixed by the PEPC.
