The Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) sitting in Abuja, on Monday declined to grant the application filed by Atiku Abubakar and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for access to inspect the server and data of smart card readers deployed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in the conduct of the February 23 presidential election.
The presiding justice of the five-man panel, Justice Mohammed Garba, in a ruling held that granting of the application would imply that the court has delved into and resolved the contentious issue of the existence of a central server at INEC. The chairman also added that doing so would further create the impression that the tribunal has concluded that there is a central server where results of the February 23 election were received and stored.
The tribunal had on June 13 reserved ruling in the application filed by Atiku and PDP on May 8, for access to inspect INEC’s central server and smart card readers allegedly used in the conduct of the February 23 presidential election.
However, the tribunal, in a unanimous decision, refused to grant the application, on the grounds that since the parties have joined issues, granting such an application at this interlocutory stage would preempt the substantive petition. “I decline to grant the relief sought; this application is refused and accordingly dismissed,” Justice Garba held.
The petitioners insisted that results from the presidential election were transmitted to the central server maintained by INEC. Atiku and PDP had in their petition stated that by the figures obtained from INEC’s server, they won the presidential election against Buhari and the third respondent, All Progressives Congress (APC). Based on the figures allegedly got from the server, Atiku said he scored 18,356,732 votes as against those of Buhari, who he said polled 16,741,430 votes.
“The servers from which the said figures were derived belong to the first respondent (INEC). The figures and votes were transmitted to the first respondent’s Presidential Result’s Server 1 and, thereafter, aggregated in INEC_PRES_RSLT_SRV2019, whose physical address or unique Mac address is 94-57-A5-DC-64-B9 with Microsoft Product ID 00252-7000000000-AA535. The above descriptions are unique to the 15th respondent’s server,” Atiku and his party claimed.
However, the electoral body said it did not use any server for the general election. “We do not have a server,” INEC counsel, Yunus Usman (SAN), told the tribunal on June 13.
