Nigeria’s electoral body, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), says it did not transmit the 2019 general election results through its server.
“We used the Federal Constitution of the Federal Republic, we used the Electoral Act and we used our own guidelines for 2019,” the commissions’s National Commissioner in charge of Southwest, Solomon Soyebi, said on Monday.
Concise News understands Soyebi, who made this known at the post-election review meeting held at the INEC office in Osogbo, Osun state, said the server was not used due to circumstances beyond the electoral body’s control.
The Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the 2019 elections, Atiku Abubakar, and his party, had asked the election petition tribunal sitting in Abuja to compel INEC to grant them access to the server and smart card readers used in the conduct of the election.
However, counsel to INEC, Yunus Ustaz Usman (SAN), in a counter affidavit on Thursday, June 13, asked the court to dismiss the application.
And in his reaction, Soyebi said, “For some reasons the Commission did not adopt ‘that option’ for 2019 election. It can only tell you that we are not ready for that technology because we were sure it would not be successful,” he said.
According to him, the clarification became necessary because of rising controversies on the transmission of the election results from states to the INEC server.
“We didn’t use it for 2019 elections and I did say again that the 2019 elections were conducted according to law,” he added.
“We used the Federal Constitution of the Federal Republic, we used the Electoral Act and we used our own guidelines for 2019.
“If you look at all of them, we did not conduct elections outside these three instruments and you will see that there was no way where the issue of transmission was highlighted there.”
INEC had announced President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) winner of the election with 15,191,847 votes with Atiku getting 11, 262,978.
But Atiku and the PDP, this news medium understands, had claimed that results from the INEC server showed that he scored 18,356,732 as against Buhari’s 16,741,430 votes.
