New twist in Osun Governorship Election Tribunal’s judgement

• INEC reveals not all data was transmitted when APC obtained BVAS server report

There appears to be a new twist in the judgment of the Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal in Osun State last Friday  which nullified the election of Ademola Adeleke of the peoples Democratic party (PDP), citing over-voting, and declaring Adegboyega Oyetola of the All Progressives Congress (APC), winner of the election.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), explaining the discrepancy in the figures, disclosed that not all the data were transmitted at the time the APC obtained the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) server report.

INEC former Director of Voter Education and Publicity, Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Monday, expressed that there should not have been a discrepancy in the 2022 Osun State governorship election, noting that the APC obtained a certified copy of the initial server report before some of the data had been transmitted by the BVAS hardware. Osaze-Uzzi observed that the judgement was not unanimous.

According to the former INEC director, “The second 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’.

“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 maintained, “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 said that there is a need to break the verdict of the tribunal, adding 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.

He declared: “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.”

Meanwhile, Governor Adeleke is proceeding on appeal.

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