Presidential Election: INEC Credited Invalid Votes To Buhari - Atiku Tells Tribunal

5 years ago

Presidential Election: INEC Credited Invalid Votes To Buhari - Atiku Tells Tribunal

The Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, has alleged that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, had at various stages of the February 23 presidential election, unlawful allocated votes to President Muhammadu Buhari.

Atiku who made the allegation in the petition he lodged before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Abuja, said he would adduce oral and documentary evidence to show that results of the election as announced by INEC, especially the votes credited to President Buhari, did not represent the lawful valid votes cast.

He alleged that in some states, INEC, deducted lawful votes that accrued to him, in its bid to ensure that Buhari was returned back to office.

Both Atiku and the PDP said they would call evidence of statisticians, forensic examiners and finger-print experts at the hearing of the petition to establish that the scores credited to Buhari were not the product of actual votes validly cast at the polling units.

“The Petitioners plead and shall rely on electronic video recordings, newspaper reports, photographs and photographic images of several infractions of the electoral process by the Respondents”, they added.

Specifically, the petitioners serialised results that were recorded from each state of the federation in order to prove that the alleged fraudulent allocation of votes to Buhari and the All Progressives Congress, APC, took place at the polling units, the ward collating centres, local government collating centres and the State collating centres.

Atiku contended that proper collation and summation of the presidential election results would show that contrary to what INEC declared, he garnered a total of 18,356,732 votes, ahead of Buhari who he said got a total of 16,741,430 votes.

“The Petitioners shall rely on the evidence of Statisticians, Forensic Examiners and other Experts, detailing the data analysis on the votes at all levels of collation, from the polling units to the final return”, he added.

“The Petitioners state that Smart Card Readers deployed by the 1st Respondent, in addition to accreditation, equally transmitted electronically the results of voting from polling units directly to the server of the 1st Respondent. The Presiding Officers of the 1st Respondent directly inputted the results from the polling units at the end of voting and transmitted directly to the server, in addition to manually taking the Form EC8As to the Wards for collation. The 1st Respondent is hereby given notice to produce the records of results from each polling unit uploaded and transmitted electronically by officials of the 1st Respondent through smart card readers to the 1st Respondent’s Servers.