By Eze Chidozie
The presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 elections, Peter Obi has said that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) helped his case by failing to provide clear copies of election results.
The LP flagbearer said so in his final written address submitted to the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC), Abuja.
According to Obi, INEC had inadvertently confirmed his claim that the umpire shortchanged him by 2.5 million votes while declaring the results of the February 25 presidential election.
During the hearing, Obi’s fourth witness at the PEPC, a professor of Mathematics at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University (UNIZIK), Awka, Anambra, Eric Uwaduegwu Ofoedu, tendered expert reports where he concluded: “I observed that, from the IREV portal, scores on Form EC8As of 39,546 polling units were inaccessible – contain uploads not connected with the Presidential Election.”
The professor added that “From the IREV portal, 18,088 polling units results were blurred.
“This number of PUs negatively impacted the votes of 2,565,269 accredited voters and 9,165,191 voters that collected their PVCS.”
But, INEC had insisted that there was no “credible evidence” that the 18,088 blurred polling units results Obi’s team downloaded from the INEC Results Viewing Portal(IREV), amounted to 2,565,269 additional votes in his favour.
But Obi’s lead counsel argued that when INEC was subpoenaed to produce Form EC8As, including the scanned copy it uploaded to IREV, the electoral body presented certified documents that were either manifestly blurred or blank, purporting they were the results of the election in respective polling units.
He argued that the blurred copies certified by INEC cannot by any stretch of imagination be described as the authentic version of the actual Form EC8A containing the records of the figures obtained by the candidates in the respective polling units, “yet INEC certified these blurred copies/images as true copies of what is in their possession”.
He urged the court to declare that “a certified copy is a copy of a document certified as true by the officer who has the custody of the original.”
Obi’s lawyers further contended that the electoral umpire has helped their case by producing a certified unreadable Form EC8As uploaded on IREV as copies of the original in its possession.
