The Independent National Electoral Commission INEC has dismissed claims by a Peoples Democratic Party’s PDP witness, one Hitler Nwala, who testified at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal PEPT on Thursday, to the effect that the 2023 Presidential Election results were intentionally deleted from the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BVAS machines in the Federal Capital Territory FCT.
Multiple sources at the Commission said, since the BVAS is not an electronic voting machine, it was unfortunate that any ICT expert could posit that the machine has the capacity to store election results.
Describing Nwala's assertions as untrue, laughable and a figment of his imagination, a deputy director at the commission who did not want his name mentioned as he was not authorized to speak to the press, said on the contrary, the BVAS was not designed as an electronic voting machine in the first place and cannot, therefore, count, collate and record raw votes at the polling units.
According to him, the BVAS has the capacity to authenticate the Permanent Voter Card PVC to ensure non-proxy voting and then accredit the voter before he or she is allowed to vote at the polling unit.
He said; “The BVAS is not an electronic voting machine. It does not count and record votes. Each BVAS contains the data of registered voters of one polling unit only to which it is assigned and accredits only the registered voters of that particular polling unit.
"So, when anyone alleges that INEC wiped off the election result from the BVAS, you automatically realize that such an individual is ignorant and knows next to nothing about the functions of the BVAS and the electoral process".
Another senior staff of the commission, told Saturday Vanguard that INEC does not even organize governorship elections in the Federal Capital Territory FCT.
"The fact that the individual talked about a governorship election in the FCT only confirms his poor understanding of the country’s electoral architecture.”
The PDP and its Presidential Candidate, Atiku Abubakar, have rejected and are challenging the outcome of the 2023 Presidential election result.
One of their witnesses, Hitler Nwala, had on June 22, told the Tribunal that the election results in all the 110 BVAS machines he examined in the FCT were deleted.
Nwala said his analysis of the BVAS revealed that their results were deleted but did not know when the deletion was carried out.
Under cross examination by INEC’s lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud, Nwala said he attached a standard device to the BVAS machine to arrive at his conclusion.
However, when the INEC Counsel attempted to give him a BVAS machine to check if the results on it were deleted as he had deposed in his affidavit, Nwala declined, saying it would be against the ethics of his profession to collect the BVAS in an open court to check it.
No comments:
Post a Comment