The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) have responded in a 291-page reply to the petition filed at the Tribunal by Atiku Abubakar, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2019 presidential election.
INEC said Atiku presented forged election results to Tribunal claiming it was from their server as they didn’t transmit results electronically.
Okay Nigeria had earlier reported that Atiku Abubakar claimed that he polled a total of 18,356,732 votes to defeat President Muhammadu Buhari, whom he said had 16,741,430 votes.
However, INEC collated results from the 36 states including FCT were Atiku polled 11,262,978 votes, while Buhari was declared winner of the presidential electing with 15,191,847 votes.
The independent electoral body responding as the first respondent in the case, said that a site (factsdontlie.com) linked to the petition was created purposely to back the forged election results.
The part of the reply to the petition seen by Okay Nigeria, reads: “Further to the foregoing, the website described as www.factsdontlieng.com was neither created nor owned by the 1st Respondent (INEC). It is a site not known to the 1st Respondent.
“The 1st Respondent does not share information with such an unclassified entity and any information purportedly derived therefrom which does not accord with the result as declared by the 1st Respondent is not authentic but rather was invented for the purpose of this case.”
Further explaining that it didn’t transmit results electronically, INEC in the reply said:
“The 1st Respondent (INEC) did not adopt electronic transmission or collation of results in the conduct of the election, voting by electronic means not having been adopted as a provision of the Electoral Act. The 1st Respondent specifically denies the existence of electronic transmission of results as it is unknown to the Electoral Act, 2010 (as amended) and Regulations and Guidelines for the conduct of the elections, 2019, and put the Petitioners to the strictest of proof thereof.”
