INEC Too Hasty To Declare Tinubu Winner Of Presidential Polls – Labour Party

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has been accused of being in a hast to declare the presidential candidate of the All Progressive Congress (APC), who is now the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, winner of the 2023 presidential election.

This was the position of the Labour Party(LP) and it’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi at the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal.

According to Obi and his party, server logs and uploads on the IReV revealed that INEC allegedly manipulated the results of the February 25 presidential election against the Labour Party.

Obi and the Labour Party’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, this online medium learnt from Daily Trust.

It would be recalled that INEC had requested the tribunal to dismiss Obi and Labour Party’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, Obi in their reply to INEC’s  preliminary objection filed by the Labour Party and Obi’s lead counsel, Levy Uzoukwu (SAN) claimed that 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.

The Labour Party flag bearer in the reply further asserted that INEC was hasty in the declaration of election in favour of Tinubu, 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% of the total votes in two-third of states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory(FCT).

Furthermore, Obi alleged that the challenge of the HTTP 500 error raised by the electoral umpire was invented as an excuse for the commission’s non-compliance with the mandatory provision for direct upload.

Obi and the Labour Party also claimed that  “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.”