PDP, LP, others fault collation process, insists INEC must upload results

Opposition parties that participated in Saturday’s presidential elections have faulted the ongoing method of collation of the presidential elections employed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

The parties, including the main opposition, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party, Action Alliance (AA), New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), and African Democratic Congress (ADC) among others insisted that INEC must instruct the Collation Officers to upload the results from the polling units to the Commission’s server even before the manual collation takes place.

They alleged that the move by INEC to announce the results manually without the result copies from polling units uploaded online was an attempt to compromise the process.

Speaking at the National Collation Center in Abuja after the result of Kwara, Osun, and Ondo states were announced, an agent of the PDP, Senator Dino Melaye who spoke on behalf of other agents of the opposition parties, said actions would be taken if the INEC chairman does not heed to their demand.

He said: “A few minutes ago, I raised the issue of the fact that in accordance with the provision of the Electoral Act, Section 60 and section 64 of the Electoral Act 2022 as amended that there’ll be the transmission of results from the polling units and the INEC chairman and Festus Okoye have repeatedly told Nigerians that there will be the transmission of results from polling units directly to the server.

“And we found out that this has not been done, INEC failed in this regard and when I raised this issue today, supported by other party agents, the national chairman of INEC evaded that because what section 47 (3) emphasize is that wherever the card reader or the BVAS failed, if they cannot get a replacement, the election should be cancelled in those areas, and we have seen from the presentation of the results yesterday, that some places were cancelled as a result of bypassing BVAS, so the only way to detect that BVAS has been bypass is for us to see the uploaded results and we insist that the chairman should show us the uploaded results state by state just like the way they are displaying the collated results they are presenting and that is the only way to test the veracity and authenticity of these results.

“If not done, that means we are only here to endorse the fraud that has been done from the units to the ward to the state. We are not here to rubber stamp infractions. We’re not here to rubber-stamp the abnormalities that have been done. We are here to check them.

“But the national chairman of INEC is not giving us the opportunity to question what they’re doing. He’s saying that all has been done, meaning we are here to rubber stamp and we are going to prove that we’re not here to rubber stamp. We have no other country to call our home but this country. We are going to do everything humanly possible to make sure that the right must be done.

“We have just met now and we are going to make a presentation by the time we resume and if they insist that they are not going to respond to us, then you will see the action we will take but we want to tell you that having suffered poverty, hunger, kidnapping killings, we will not allow a continuation of failure. We must make sure that the right thing is done and chairman is putting his integrity on the test. Nigerians are watching. The world is watching even the dead are watching to see what INEC will do but battle ensures that only authentic results are announced here is a battle of no retreat no surrender ”