The Battle Line Is Drawn: INEC Presiding Officers Back Atiku, Says Results Were Truly Transmitted Electronically

Some presiding officers for the Independent Electoral National Commission have come out to support PDP’s presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar’s claim that the election results were sent electronically. There are at least 13 PO’s who have testified under oath that they truly forwarded the results of the 2019 presidential election to INEC. This was after Atiku Abubakar constantly challenged the result of the 2019 elections that showed that he lost the race to his APC counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari. To this, Atiku’s legal team shared a different result which showed that he polled 18,356,732 to defeat Muhammadu Buhari who polled 16,741,430 votes. This was a major contradiction to the results shared by INEC which said that Buhari received 15,191,847 votes against Abubakar’s 11,262,978 votes. According to Atiku’s legal representatives, the “real” results were released by an insider from INEC who had access to the internal server and other tools used by the commission during the election. They also provided unique identification information of computers that they said belonged to INEC, which they expected experts from Microsoft, IBM and Oracle to corroborate. In its previous response to Atiku’s claims, INEC strongly denied having a central server during the election, revealing that such activities were not permitted by the electoral law. The witnesses according to the affidavits said they worked as presiding officers and assistant presiding officers in Borno and Yobe. They were only identified in the documents by their initials. The witnesses comprise seven presiding officers and five assistant presiding officers. They were six each from Borno and Yobe, and swore they were adequately recruited and trained by the commission ahead of the election. The witnesses were quoted to have said that: “We were specifically instructed that the use of the smart card reader for accreditation, verification, authentication, collation and transmission of results is mandatory and that any election conducted without the use of the smart card reader would be invalid. I took part in the conduct of the Presidential and National Assembly (Senate and House of Representatives) elections…where I served as the presiding officer (PO) and I ensured the use of the smart card reader for accreditation, verification, authentication, collation and transmission of votes in my polling unit. At the end of voting, the information on the smart card reader, the results inclusive were collated by me in the presence of the party agents and other ad-hoc staff of the 1st respondent after which my assistant presiding officer (AP0-1) transmitted the result electronically in my presence to INEC’s server using the smart card reader and the code provided by the commission,” a typical testimony from one of the witnesses read.”  Photo Credit: Getty

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