Tinubu Requests A Court Order To Examine The Voting Documents.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) utilized sensitive documents for the conduct of the presidential election on February 25. The President-Elect, Bola Tinubu, has asked the Court of Appeal for permission to view these information.
Ahead of the other 17 candidates that ran for president, Tinubu was proclaimed the victor by INEC.
According to statistics released by INEC, Tinubu received a total of 8,794,726 votes, beating Atiku’s total of 6,984,520 and Obi’s total of 6,101,533 votes.
Akintola Makinde, a lawyer for Tinubu, said that in order to prepare his defense against petitions trying to invalidate Tinubu’s election, he would need to examine, scan, and make duplicates of some of the electoral papers.
This was said by Makinde on Tuesday at the session in the nation’s capital, Abuja.
Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, candidates for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), and INEC, respectively, had previously been given permission to review election-related documents by the Presidential Election Petition Court.
In the meanwhile, Tanimu Inuwa, an attorney representing INEC, has requested that the Court of Appeal reject the Labour Party’s plea to examine the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
Onyechi Ikpeazu, counsel for the LP, said at the Tuesday hearing that his team’s ability to conduct a forensic inspection requires a physical check of the BVAS. Moreover, they requested that INEC store and organize the material.
Nevertheless, INEC’s attorney, Inuwa, requested that the plea be rejected by the court since doing so would seriously delay the March 11 gubernatorial poll.
In addition, each of the 176,000 polling places in the nation has a different BVAS system that has to be set, and it will be exceedingly difficult for them to do so quickly.
As soon as the data was transmitted to their backend server, Inuwa gave the assurance that no data would be lost. Obi and Atiku had requested access to all the sensitive documents INEC had used for the conduct of the presidential election conducted on February 25. On March 3, the Court of Appeal in Abuja approved their request.
The petitioners pleaded with the court to order INEC to let them get the records that were kept there and utilized for the presidential election.
They said that the sought papers would support their case challenging the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate Tinubu’s victory in the presidential election.
