Despite hastily announcing Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the election’s victor, data obtained from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) results viewing portal (IREV) reveals that as of May 2, 2023, the electoral body has yet to upload results from 9403 polling units.
Tinubu’s victory in the presidential election, which took place on February 25, 2023, was announced on March 1 of that same year.
However, only 167,443 of the 176,846 polling places had results submitted to IREV under the heading “Presidential election – 2023-02-25 – Presidential”.
Only 94.68% of the overall presidential election results have been posted thus far, according to the statistics.
The results from 9403 that have not yet been offloaded may be enough to invalidate the election results, according to Supreme Court of Nigeria rulings in the past.
4,701,500 ballots will be cast but not counted, assuming that each polling place has 500 eligible voters.
Meanwhile, figures gathered from IREV show that Tinubu received 5,406,769 votes, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) received 4,142,459 votes, and Mr. Peter Gregory Obi of the Labour Party (LP) received 4,026,117 votes.
According to the INEC-announced results, Tinubu received 8,805,654, Atiku Abubakar received 6,984,520, and Peter Obi received 6,102,756.
It is clear that, according to IREV, Tinubu received 1,264,310 votes against Atiku and 1,380,652 votes against Obi, respectively. According to INEC’s announcement, the numbers are 1,821,134 votes against Atiku and 2,702,898 votes against Obi.
In conclusion, INEC was unable to submit the results of 9403 polling units, and as proceedings on the petitions before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal over the contentious February 25 election began, it was unable to defend itself at the Tribunal.
According to The Punch, the claim that more than 9,000 polling places had fabricated or altered results is supported by evidence.
Sources within INEC indicate that because the initial results are no longer available, the commission is having trouble reconciling the numbers it released during the presidential election.
According to a source, INEC only has amended results at this time.
When INEC controversially shut down its server during the presidential election, it became challenging for the commission’s employees to submit results using the BiModal Accreditation Voter System (BVAS) devices, which led to the crisis’s emergence.
When it received the court’s approval to format the BVAS devices for the governorship election, which took place on March 18, an already dire situation was rendered even worse.
As it prepares to go before the Election Petition Tribunal, INEC will have a difficult time justifying the election results it declared without providing proof of the results the presiding officer provided.
However, it should be noted that 240 polling places did not hold elections since there were no registered voters there, bringing the overall number of voting places in the nation down to 176,606 from 176,84.
CREDIT: The Punch
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