Fresh reports have revealed that at least 13 presiding officers who said they were deployed as electoral officers by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the 2019 presidential election have admitted under oath that they transmitted results electronically.
A question about whether or not results were forwarded to a central
database of the commission has been amongst the top grounds for
contesting the presidential election results by Atiku Abubakar and his
opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Abubakar and PDP have challenged the results of the February election
at the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal last month, saying he
won the election and was in possession of evidence that would upturn the
declared outcome.
Atiku’s legal team submitted a different result to the tribunal,
which showed the former vice-president as the winner of the election.
The result showed Abubakar had scored 18,356,732 votes to defeat Buhari,
whom they said received 16,741,430 votes.
This contradicted the results declared by INEC, which said Buhari
received 15,191,847 votes against Abubakar’s 11,262,978 votes. Atiku’s
lawyers said the results were released by an INEC whistleblower who had
access to the commission’s internal server and other tools throughout
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 initial response to Mr Abubakar’s petition, INEC strongly
denied operating a server during the election, saying such activities
were not permitted by the electoral law. The commission accused Mr
Abubakar of circulating fake results for the purpose of his petition.
The persons, 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.
A typical testimony from one of the witnesses reads;
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