The Labour Party candidate during the last Saturday’s governorship election in Enugu State, Barr. Chijioke Edeoga has demanded the outright cancellation of the results generated from the Nkanu East Local Government Area of the State.
The Barrister, In a petition, addressed to the Independent National Electoral Commission, said the non-usage of BVAS rendered the results from Nkanu East nullity.
According to him, the total number of accredited results in the INEC server shows that the PDP allocated votes to its candidate, Barr. Peter Mbah.
Erdogan said the total votes in IREV for Nkanu East is about 15,000, whereas, PDP allocated over 30,000 votes to its candidate, Mbah.
He said, “The just concluded Enugu State Governorship election is fraught with serial irregularities and fundamental flaws in the conduct of the Governorship election held on 18th March 2023, particularly concerning Nkanu East Local Government Area of Enugu State.
“We humbly wish to bring these irregularities to the attention of the Returning Officer for appropriate action as provided in the Electoral Act of 2022.
“The Electoral Act and guidelines made pursuant thereto provide that the Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System is to be used for the conduct of the Governorship and State Houses Election nationwide.
“This is a mandatory requirement and failure to comply with these requirements renders any result of such election invalid.
“The Commission through several public service announcements reiterated the centrality of the use of BVAS in the accreditation of voters through their permanent voter’s cards and the transmission of the results directly from the polling units to the INEC portal.”
He explained further, that the results collated by the Local Government Collation Officer were at variance with the results uploaded to the INEC IREV portal.
“The unexplained discrepancies are a result of non-usage of BVAS as mandatorily required by the Electoral Act and the guidelines of the electoral body, which led to the fraudulent allocation of votes to PDP by the officials appointed by INEC to conduct the election.
“No wonder the discrepancies between the votes they hurriedly uploaded to the IREV and the votes they presented for collation.”
He added that in several other polling units across the wards, the results collated show that the votes allocated to the candidates are more than the total number of PVCs collected as a result of non-usage of the BVAS.
“It is clear that the BVAS as required by the Electoral Act was not used for the voters’ accreditation. By the Electoral Act 2022 Sec. 47 (3), the results from the entire Nkanu East should be canceled.
“We therefore urge the Returning Officer to cancel the results of the Nkanu East Local Government Governorship election, which was conducted without the usage of BVAS as mandatorily required by the Act,” he said.
