Drama at collation centre as PDP’s Dino Melaye rejects Ekiti results, alleges over-voting

There was a mild drama at the national Collation Center on Monday as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) rejected the Presidential election result declared for Ekiti State, alleging over-voting.

The Drama began before the beginning of collation on Monday when a chieftain of the PDP, Senator Dino Melaye who is also the agent of the PDP raised an observation that the figures of results announced by the commission for Ekiti State do not correlate.

INEC had declared the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, winner of Ekiti State with 201,494 defeating his closest rival Abubakar Atiku of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, who scored 89, 554.

Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) polled 11,397 votes while Rabiu Kwankwaso of New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) polled 264 votes; 1703 votes were canceled due to the bye-pass of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and over-voting.

But making his observation, Melaye, said after calculation done by the PDP, there was a discrepancy of an increase of 887 in the total number of figures from Ekiti State.

The agents of the Action Alliance, AA, and Labour party agreed with the observation made by Melaye

But INEC, chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu insisted that the commission stood by the result declared by the collation officer of Ekiti, Prof. Akeem Olawale Lasisi, who is the Vice Chancellor, Federal University of Health Sciences, Ila Orangun, Osun State.

“I still insist that the figure presented by the state collection officer for the presidential election for Ekiti state of the total number of accredited voters is 315,058. This is what is on the spreadsheet that we screened yesterday. And this is also what is on the actual result manual recorded by the scope and signed by the PDP agent and agents of other political parties back in Ekiti state.

“But having said that, I’ve taken note of your observations, let us make progress on that one. But what we have here is exactly what I’ve said. And any other figure that is at variance with this one cannot supersede the official result presented. let’s make progress.”