Tribunal: There was no over-voting in Osun governorship election – INEC
The Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC) has launched its defence of the July 16th victory of Governor Ademola Adeleke, positing that over-voting can only be proven through the comparison of server secondary data with primary data in the BVAS machines.
In a very revealing disclosure for the second straight day of defence, the electoral body faulted claims of voting as emanating from a lack of understanding or deliberate oversight on the part of the petitioners on the working of the voting machines.
In a presentation by the witness from INEC, Abimbola Oladunjoye, the Tribunal was told that after the election, the electoral body had to embark on a synchronization process after which data will be transmitted to the backend server.
According to the witness, if there is no network on a BVAS machine, the information will not be transmitted to the back-end server. This makes the back-end server an unreliable source to determine over-voting.
On the previous data provided by a team of lawyers from the All Progressives Congress(APC), the INEC witness said it was to fulfil the spirit of the freedom of Information law which mandates the commission to provide the information sought within a stipulated number of days.
While explaining that the commission deployed 976 BVAS devices to cater for some large voting centers during the election, the commission affirmed that over-voting cannot be proven except through diligent comparison between form EC8A and the physical BVAS Machine.
“The earlier report as of 22nd of July was in fulfilment of the FOI law mandating INEC to provide a response to information sought. As at this time, synchronization of data was still ongoing at the INEC server backend”, the witness noted.
The setting at the tribunal was punctuated by intermittent adjournments even as the BVAS machines used at the challenged polling units by APC counsels were brought to court today.
It will be recalled that the total sum of 976 polling units was falsely alleged for over-voting.
However, Mrs Oladunjoye who is a deputy director of the ICT department cleared the mess with a thorough explanation before the tribunal today.
She further established that a BVAS machine was deployed to where the total registration of voters was more than 750, stressing that the primary source of the overall result was from form EC8A, BVAS machines and the registered voters.
The details were given on how the failure of the network can cause awkwardness in the transmission of the result to the headquarters. She thereby said the result will remain on the BVAS storage.
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