The National Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) has told the Presidential Tribunal sitting in Abuja that some documents requested by the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, LP, at the 2023 election, Mr. Peter Obi to be presented as exhibits at the Presidential Election Tribunal are non-existent.
Africa Today News, New York reports that Obi and the Labour Party (LP) are currently challenging the Feb. 25 election of President Bola Tinubu before the court in a petition marked CA/PEPC/03/2023.
Respondents in the petition are INEC, President Tinubu, Vice-President Kashim Shettima, and their All Progressives Congress (APC).
Giving evidence before the court, Mr Lawrence Bayode, Deputy Director, ICT at INEC, told the court that out of the five documents Obi asked for; two were non-existent, while one was work in progress.
One of Obi’s witnesses, Ms Loretta Ogah, an ICT cloud engineer, said she contested the election into the House of Representatives on the platform of Labour Party in Cross River but lost the election.
Read Also: 2023: How BVAS Machines Failed Us, INEC Officials Tell Court
Ogah was cross-examined by Mr. Wole Olanipakun (SAN), counsel for Tinubu and Shettima.
She told the court that she sued INEC after her loss because the electoral umpire did not list her name on its portal as a result of network failure.
Also cross-examined by Mr. Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), counsel for APC, Ogah told the court that glitches did not occur on the INEC portal on Feb. 25.
She said she did not know INEC’s password protocol as she was not INEC’s employee.
The court presided over by Justice Haruna Tsammani, adjourned further hearing to Wednesday.
In another report, three Presiding Officers of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), yesterday testified as witnesses in the case of a former Vice President and candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, filed to nullify President Bola Tinubu’s election.
The trio described how the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, or BVAS, machines failed them on February 25, the day the presidential election was held. They had to take turns mounting the box because they had received witness summonses from the Presidential Election Petition Court, or PEPC, located in Abuja.
The witnesses claim that while they were successful in utilizing the BVAS devices to transfer the results of the National Assembly election that was held on the same day, their repeated attempts to electronically submit the results of the presidential election to INEC’s IReV portal were unsuccessful.