Olufemi Ogunrinde, an ad hoc staff of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), said on Friday that he transferred results of the 2019 presidential elections to a central server.
SaharaReporters reported that Ogunrinde said this during the presidential election tribunal set up to hear the petition of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate in the February 23 election, Atiku Abubakar.
Atiku and the PDP are challenging the results of the election, claiming electoral malpractice on the part of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
The party and Atiku claimed that they won the election with about 2 million votes according to the data collected from the electoral commission’s central ‘server’.
INEC had denied collating result through the central server.
However, at the tribunal on Friday, Ogunrinde said he transferred result to a central server during the election.
“All I know is that the PO (presiding officer) brought the forms EC8C. I put the information from the form into the smart card reader which I transmitted to the server,” he said.
Ogunrinde, however, during further cross-examination, said he had never seen the server in question.
He explained that he just transmitted information from the smart card readers to the server based on what he had been taught.
The PDP had requested to inspect the INEC servers after alleging that details of election results were manipulated by the commission to favour Buhari.
The tribunal denied the request to inspect INEC’s server last month, saying granting such an order would presuppose that the court had ruled that the server actually existed.
The court deferred pronouncement on the server until a proper argument has been made by both teams in the substantive petition, which hearing began last week.
