Osun Tribunal Verdict: INEC Reveals Why There Is A Discrepancy In  Results That Nullified Adeleke’s Election

The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC has thrown more light on the controversy trailing the judgement of the Osun State Election Petition Tribunal that nullified the election of senator Ademola Adeleke in the July 16 2022 governorship election.

The commission revealed that all the data related to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) in the election had not been transmitted before being forwarded to the All Progressives Congress (APC).

The explanation follows the judgement by the Osun State Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal.

According to the former INEC Director, Voter Education and Publicity, Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, there should not have been any discrepancy in the governorship election.

Osaze-Uzzi while speaking on Channels TV Sunrise Daily on Monday, explained that the APC obtained a certified copy of the initial server report before some of the data had been transmitted by the BVAS hardware.

He, however, pointed out that the verdict was not a unanimous judgement.

“The second [tribunal] member – the honourable justice who dissented from his two colleagues – said, ‘I would rather use the primary source of this information, and the primary source of this data is actually the machine itself,” Channels quoted him as saying.

“It is basically a computer. So, rather than go to the server where it transmitted data, I would use the printout from the machine itself.

“The machines were tendered, so were the reports from the server, and there ought not to have been a discrepancy, but somewhere along the line, not all the data had been transmitted at the time the APC obtained the certified copy of the initial server report.”

Osaze-Uzzi, however, described the judgement as a validation of the role BVAS has played in enhancing the electoral process.

Rather than view the discrepancy from a negative perspective, he encouraged stakeholders to take a more optimistic outlook, arguing that BVAS exposed the over-voting in the election.

“It was BVAS that exposed that as it were, and the fact that the BVAS report was relied on. But we have to be careful; which of the BVAS reports was relied on? Was it what was transmitted to the server – to the back-end – or was it the BVAS itself?” he posed.

According to him, there is a need to break the verdict of the tribunal. He added that the majority of the tribunal – “the chairman and the second member” – relied on the initial report and the initial report of the back-end, duly certified by INEC.

“It was downloaded from the server [after it was] transmitted. But a couple of days later – INEC used the word ‘synchronised’, I’m not too sure I like that word, but – you synchronise it and say, ‘Have all the results been transmitted – has all data been transmitted from the machine, BVAS itself, to the server?’

“The machine is a physical one and then it transmits to a physical one. It now went, checked and said, ‘There’s a problem here.’ The BVAS report now downloaded itself, [we] now brought it out and examined each BVAS machine and now found out that no, some data was not transmitted to the server,” Osaze-Uzzi said.