VANGUARD
The Osun state Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said not all data was transmitted as at the time the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC obtained the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) report.
A former Director, Voter Education and Publicity, INEC, Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, stated this during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Monday.
Recall that the tribunal ruling, on Friday, had nullified the election of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP’s Ademola Adeleke amid over-voting and additional votes for Adegboyega Oyetola of the APC, putting him ahead of Adeleke.
But, Ozaze-Uzzi said there should not have been a discrepancy in the 2022 Osun State governorship election.
He explained that the APC obtained a certified copy of the initial server report before some of the data had been transmitted by the BVAS hardware.
The Director, however, pointed out that the verdict was not a unanimous judgement.
He said, “The second [tribunal] member – the honourable justice who dissented from his two colleagues – said, ‘I would rather use the primary source of this information, and the primary source of this data is actually the machine itself.
“It is basically a computer. So, rather than go to the server where it transmitted data, I would use the printout from the machine itself.
“The machines were tendered, so were the reports from the server, and there ought not to have been a discrepancy, but somewhere along the line, not all the data had been transmitted at the time the APC obtained the certified copy of the initial server report.”
Osaze-Uzzi, however, described the judgement as a validation of the role BVAS has played in enhancing the electoral process.
He encouraged stakeholders to take a more optimistic outlook, arguing that BVAS exposed the over-voting in the election.
