Presidential poll: Why we refused to sign result sheet – PDP

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) on Wednesday explained why it has refused to sign the result sheet declaring President Muhammadu Buhari winner of the 2010 presidential election.

INEC had pronounced incumbent President Buhari of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) winner of the last Saturday election, after the conclusion of collation of results at the National Collation Centre in Abuja, early morning Wednesday.

Buhari in the result declared by INEC scored 15,191,847 votes to defeat Atiku, a former Vice President, who polled 11,262,978 votes.

But the PDP, whose candidate, Atiku Abubakar, came second in the election, refused to assent to the poll result and vowed to explore every option, including the legal process to air out its objection of the outcome of the exercise.

The party, whose agent, Osita Chidoka, declined to sign the result, gave three reasons for the action, insisting that the results declared did not represent the valid votes of Nigerians.

He said the PDP does not accept the result as representing the valid votes of Nigerians. “We have made three issues: first, after all the investment in technology, we expected that INEC, after spending N27 billion in this year’s budget alone for technology, would have for the purpose of transparency, not just for law, projected to us the result of what the card reader that they used displayed about the people that went through the card reader verification. That singular act has put a dent on the image of the election.

“The second one is the issue we raised about the number of registered voters’ vis-à-vis what the chairman now calls collated voters, which means that 1.6 million people are missing in the voter register. We think that issue is substantial enough to require a resolution.

Chidoka said the party believed that the difference between the accredited voters and the votes cast which came to about 750,000 as well as the cancellations that took place in the election impacting 2.7 million voters required to be looked into seriously.

“More importantly, we think that INEC should have looked consciously to the use of the card reader, the absence of card reader is a major violation in the elections, it renders that election null and void, that’s what the chairman promised us.

PDP’s position was followed by some explanation from the INEC chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, who noted that the difference in the valid votes and cancellations were insignificant to impact on the general outcome of the election.