Only 31% Of Collated Results Was Mathematically Correct – INEC Witness Confesses To Violations

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu commences his defence of the petition filed by the People’s Democratic Party and Atikwa Bubakar, challenging his declaration by INEC as president-elect on Tuesday.

VerseNews Nigeria reports that this follows the close of defence by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which is the first respondent in the petition.

INEC called just one witness, an ICT expert Dr Lawrence Bioday, who testified that even  if results were not electronically transmitted, it would not affect the integrity of the election.

Bioday also tendered what he called a cloud trail log indicating supposed glitches encountered in the process of upload of results.

But under cross-examination, the witness said the commission did not report the glitches to the INEC cloud services provider Amazon Web Services Inc.

The witness also read a part of the final copy of the report of the European Union Election Observation Mission Report, EUEOM, to Nigeria, which stated that only 31% of the results firmly uploaded on the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IREV) were mathematically correct. But INEC, Tinubu and the All Progressive Congress (APC) vehemently objected to the admissibility of the report.

During cross-examination, Council for Tinubu, Walig, or Lani Kwekung asked the witness if the results transmitted electronically or manually would not affect the integrity of the election, and the witness said it wouldn’t.

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Council for APC, Latif Agwemi, asked the witness if INEC doesn’t have an electronic collision system, since results were deleted manually.  The witness affirmed that the commission does not have any.

Agwemi also asked the witness if he was aware that INEC had published in the Tribune newspaper a few days before the elections that it would not transmit results electronically, and the witness said yes.

Council for the PDP, Chris Uje, on his part, tendered the European Union Observation Mission  Final Report, and asked the witness if he had seen it, but the witness answered that “he was aware of the report and hadn’t seen the content of the report”

Although the respondents objected to the report’s admissibility from the EU, the witness was made to read out page 6, and the report’s first sentence, which stated that only 31% of the results, formally uploaded on the IRF server, were mathematically correct. While stating that not all results were uploaded before declaration of Polatinubu as president, the witness noted that no formal report was sent to Amazon Web Services by the Commission on the issues encountered.