Tribunal: ‘There Was No Over-voting’, Says INEC In Defend Of Governor Adeleke’s Victory 

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 comparison of server secondary data with primary data in the BVAS machines.

The electoral body faulted claims of voting as originating from a lack of understanding or deliberate oversight on the part of the petitioners on how the voting machines worked in a very revealing disclosure for the second consecutive day of defence.

Abimbola Oladunjoye, an INEC witness, explained to the Tribunal that following the election, the electoral body had to start a synchronisation process, after which data would be sent 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 backend server. This makes the backend server an unreliable source to determine over voting.

The INEC witness explained that the previous information was provided by a team of lawyers from the All Progressives Congress (APC) in order to uphold the spirit of the freedom of information law, which requires the commission to provide information requested within a certain amount of time.

The commission asserted that over voting cannot be proven unless form EC8A and the actual BVAS Machine are carefully compared, even though the commission stated that 976 BVAS devices were deployed to support some large voting centres during the election.

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“The earlier report as at 22nd of July was in fulfillment of the FOI law mandating inec to provide response to information sought. As at this time, synchronization of data was still ongoing at the inec server backend”, the witness noted.

The sitting at tribunal was punctuated by intermittent adjournments even as the 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 were falsely alleged for over voting.

However, Mrs Oladunjoye, who is a deputy director of ICT department cleared the mess by thorough explanation before the tribunal today. 

She further established that a BVAS machine was deployed to where the total registration of voters were more than 750, stressing that the primary source of overall result was form EC8A, BVAS machines and the registered voters. 

The details were given on how network failure of the network can cause awkwardness for transmission of the result to the headquarters. She thereby said the result will remain on the BVAS storage.

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