For the first time, Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has addressed claims that it violated both its own rules and the Electoral Act 2022 in the manner in which the results of the most recent presidential election were tallied. It is a hint as to the legal strategy it plans to use to defend itself before the Presidential Election Tribunal. The Action Peoples Party (APP) had filed a petition with the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC) in Abuja, and INEC's position was in response to that.
Due to alleged material non-compliance with Nigerian electoral laws and INEC regulations, the APP is contesting the outcome of the presidential election as well as Bola Tinubu's designation as the All Progressives Congress (APC) standard bearer.
However, INEC insisted that it held free and fair elections on February 25 in a response to the lawsuit filed by one of the parties, the APP, through one of its lawyers, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN), a former president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).
In one of the papers on file with the tribunal, it was stated, “The election was free, fair, credible and in compliance with the constitution and the Electoral Act, 2022 and other relevant laws and guidelines,â€
The APP claimed that INEC had broken its own rules and regulations.
However, citing paragraphs 50 to 55 of the rules and guidelines for the conduct of the 2023 presidential election, INEC rejected the party's claim that results collation was to be done electronically.
The electoral umpire explained, “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,â€
The claim that its officials manipulated the results to favor a candidate from a particular political party or that there was excessive voting was also rejected.
It added that the reason the presidential results weren't uploaded right away was because the 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 fix the problem.
“It was observed that while the result sheets were being successfully uploaded through the e-transmission system to the iRev portal in respect of the Senatorial and House of Representatives elections to their respective modules, the e-transmission was not processing and uploading the result sheets to the iRev portal in respect of the presidential election. 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,†INEC said.
The electoral body stated that it would present the ICT department's report as evidence during the tribunal hearing along with two witnesses who are INEC officials in order to further clarify its position and lend support to it.
The PEPC has not yet set the dates for the five petitions that have been received thus far from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Labour Party (LP), the APP, Action Alliance (AA), and the Allied Peoples Movement (APM).