According to Vanguard, the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) will lose clout over the next few weeks as the court’s five-member panel, headed by Judge Haruna Tsammani, has sent attorneys and claimants back to their chambers for submission of final written addresses.
Vanguard reports that a final written statement is a legal argument that the parties make in writing at the end of the hearing.
It expresses the parties’ point of Next view and why the verdict should be in their favor.
After weeks of hearing the plaintiffs’ case; Alhaji Abubakar Atiku and the People’s Democratic Party and Peter Obi and the Labor Party were now available to open their defenses.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the first respondent to the petition, opened and closed its case with a single witness.
The witness, Mr.Lawrence Bayode, a deputy director in the commission’s information technology department, insisted that the presidential election was free and fair and substantially by the 2022 electoral law.
Bayode also told the court that the integrity of the election was not compromised whether photographic copies of polling station results recorded by the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) were submitted manually or electronically.
According to him, the error in the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IREV) on election day did not affect the actual results of the candidates because the results remained the same for each of them.
When asked whether INEC had filed a formal complaint with Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the glitches that occurred during the presidential election, the witness said, We were not required to provide Amazon with a report on the technical glitch, and we did not.
At the request of the plaintiffs’ lawyer, the witness in court read parts of the report of the European Union Election Observation Mission, which had previously been admitted into evidence.
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