TRIBUNAL: Tinubu begins defense as INEC ICT Director is set to testify against Atiku, Obi on July
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has lined up witnesses to defend the election victory of President Bola Tinubu as the Presidential Election Petitions Court reconvenes on Monday (July 3), and one of them is Dr. Lawrence Bayode, Deputy Director in the ICT Department of the electoral umpire, Platinum Times reports.
The petitioners, which include the Peoples Democratic Party and Atiku Abubakar as well as the Labour Party and Peter Obi, finished presenting evidence and witnesses last Friday. They emphasized, among other things, that INEC’s failure to upload scanned polling unit results in real-time violates the Electoral Act 2022 and amounts to electoral fraud.
They ask the PEPC to declare them the winners of the 2023 presidential election while nullifying Tinubu’s election in their respective petitions.
To explain his team’s findings on the INEC Results Viewing Portal, IREV, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, machines, and to refute INEC’s assertion that “technical glitches” prevented transmission of the presidential results to the IReV portal, Obi had testified before the court alongside experts in cloud engineering and cyber security, including a professor of mathematics.
Along with other witnesses, Atiku also introduced a forensics specialist.
According to Bayode’s under oath testimony, which Platinum Times has access to, INEC’s technical team did everything possible to restore the (IREV) application to functionality during the February 25 presidential and national assembly elections, including developing and deploying patches and updates to fix bugs that prevented the BVAS machine from uploading results in real time from the polling places.
He said that the first presidential result was “successfully” uploaded at 8:55 pm on February 25, 2023, following a 4 hour and 50 minute period of outage on the IREV program.
“The investigation by the INEC experts shows that the system was returning error codes specifically HTTP 500 error.
“HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) 500 error is a coding message which indicates that a computer or server has encountered an unexpected error that has prevented it from carrying out or fulfilling a specific request or executing a command,” he said in his witness statement.
Bayode further explained that the upload of data or images captured and automatically stored on the BVAS machine by presiding officers requires data service of mobile network operators.
“Where there is no data service or where the service is poor, the BVAS device is designed to work offline. The upload of data will occur when data service is available,” Bayode added, maintaining that offline transmission using BVAS did not affect the integrity of upload of the election result to the e-transmission and IREV portal.
Platinum Times reports that INEC has five days to call witnesses in order to clear the way for Tinubu’s legal team and the All Progressive Congress to follow suit.
According to the PEPC mandate, parties are required to have finished presenting their evidence by the end of July, and parties will adopt their final addresses in August.
The petitions will be decided upon in September.