The Presidential Election Tribunal sitting in Abuja on Monday stroke out an application jointly filed by the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar, and his party to compel the Independent National Electoral Commission to accord them access to inspect the server the commission used for the transmission of results during the February 23 presidential election.
The five-member jury in its unanimous verdict, turned down Atiku Abubakar’s application, saying the request could not be granted because issues had been joined by parties over the existence or otherwise of the server.
The jury said it is legally out of place for the tribunal to delve into the server issue at the interlocutory stage of the panel’s sittings as the existence of server is still a burning matter of much controversy.
The PDP and Mr Abubakar, through their lawyers, led by Levy Uzoukwu, prayed the tribunal to compel INEC to allow them to conduct a check on its server, smart cards and other materials used in the election.
In a counter Affidavit, the counsel representing INEC, Yunus Usman, prayed the the Presidential Tribunal to dismiss the application.
“They are asking us to bring something we do not have,” Mr Usman said.
He further made reference to the Court’s judgement of March 6 granting the PDP permission to scrutinize only election materials without central server.
The PDP and its presidential candidates, Atiku Abubakar are aggrieved as they claimed that INEC central server showed the PDP won the election with a landslide margin of over six million.
The counsel to President Muhammadu Buhari, Wole Olanipekun, and the APC, Lateef Fagbemi, in their objection, prayed the court to throw out the application for their inability to experimentally prove the existence of the server.
Mr Abubakar had declared that results from the INEC server indicated that he scored 18,356,732 votes as against 16,741,430 votes by Mr Buhari. INEC had through manual collation announced President Buhari winner of the election with 15,191,847 votes with Mr Abubakar polling 11, 262,978 votes.
“The servers from which the said figures were derived belong to the first Respondent (INEC). The figures and votes were transmitted to the first Respondent’s Presidential Result’s Server 1 and thereafter aggregated in INEC_PRES_RSLT_SRV2019, whose Physical Address or unique Mac Address is 94-57-A5-DC-64-B9 with Microsoft Product ID 00252-7000000000-AA535. The above descriptions are unique to the first Respondent’s Server,” Mr Abubakar and his party said.
“There is no conjecture in the votes and scores in the table pleaded by the petitioners. The figures are factual.”