The presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi has said server logs and uploads show that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) manipulated the results of the February 25 presidential election against the party.
Obi and LP’s submission is contained in a further reply to the preliminary objection by INEC asking the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal to dismiss their petition challenging the outcome of the election.
INEC had told the tribunal to dismiss Obi and LP’s petition “because the issues raised lacked unspecific and caught up by issue estoppel, and thus academic, nebulous, generic, ambiguous, hypothetical, grossly defective and abusive.”
However, in the reply filed by their lead counsel, Levy Uzoukwu (SAN), Obi said there was no factual basis for INEC’s alleged circumvention of the mandatory transmission of the results of the election from the BVAS in the polling units to the IReV.
Obi and LP said the alleged issue of the HTTP 500 error invented by INEC was an excuse for its non-compliance with the mandatory provision for direct upload.
Obi and LP further aver that in the 1st Respondent (INEC)’s unlawful invention of ‘technological glitches’ by which results of the election were misrepresented, the actual scores of the petitioners (Obi and LP) were suppressed, omitted, miscalculated, and deducted as shown in the reports and forensic analysis pleaded in the petition and incorporated by reference herein.”
Obi contend that INEC was hasty in the declaration of election in favour of Bola Tinubu of the APC despite the results showing they did not score the majority of lawful votes in the election and failed to meet the constitutional requirement of 25 percent of the total votes in two-third of states of the federation and the FCT.
