The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has denied breaking any law in the conduct of 2023 elections, dismissing allegations that it failed to follow electoral guidelines.
It is the first time the electoral umpire is responding to the series of legal cases emanating from the outcome of the presidential election.
Days ago, the All Action Peoples Party (APP) joined the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP), to challenge the process and the outcome of the election, which they alleged to have breached the Electoral Act 2022. The parties have all filed the cases before the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC) in Abuja.
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INEC lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud, in a statement said the conduct of the election was free and fair and that the process followed electoral guidelines.
“The election was free, fair, credible and in compliance with the constitution and the Electoral Act, 2022 and other relevant laws and guidelines,” he said.
The electoral body also urged the tribunal to “dismiss or strike out the petition” filed by the LP for being “grossly incompetent, abusive, vague, nebulous, generic, general, non-specific, ambiguous, equivocal, hypothetical and academic.”
The applicants’ argument has been based on INEC’s failure to transmit the results from polling units to its iRev portal in real time.
But in its defense seen in a court document, the electoral commission dismissed the argument as a basis to declare the conduct of the election illegal. It said paragraphs 50 to 55 of the regulations and guidelines for the conduct of the 2023 presidential election allow the commission to use alternate means for collation.
“There was no collation system of the 3rd respondent (INEC) to which polling unit results were required to be transmitted by the presiding officers…the prescribed mode of collation was manual collation of the various forms EC8A, EC8B, EC8C, EC8D and EC8E in the presidential election,” INEC said.
The commission also dismissed the allegation that results were doctored by its officials to favor a particular political party’s candidate or that there was over-voting.
In their petition, the applicants had pointed out that while it was not possible for presidential election’s results to be uploaded, electoral officials were able to upload to Senatorial and House of Reps results, indicating that the system was compromised.
But according to its defense filing, INEC stated that its online result viewing portal became erratic at the point of collation and members of its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) team were called in to rectify the problem, because the presidential results were not immediately uploaded.
“It was observed that while the result sheets were being successfully uploaded through the e-transmission system to the iRev portal in respect of the Senatorial and House of Representatives elections to their respective modules, the e-transmission was not processing and uploading the result sheets to the iRev portal in respect of the presidential election. The system was encountering glitches and was extremely slow.
“The 3rd respondent’s (INEC) technical team took every step to restore the application to functionality…five application/patches updates were created and deployed immediately with the aim of fixing the error,” it said.
The electoral umpire said it will use testimony from its ICT department and two INEC official witnesses as evidence at the tribunal.
Other parties who filed petitions challenging the presidential election include the Action Alliance (AA) and the Allied Peoples Movement (APM). The tribunal is yet to fix a date for the hearing.