Following the judgment of the Osun State Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal, which sacked Governor Ademola Adeleke and reinstated Gboyega Oyetola, a former Director of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said not all data was transmitted when the All Progressives Congress (APC) obtained the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) server report.
Recall that the Osun State Election Petitions Tribunal had on Friday ruled and nullified the election of Adeleke and directed INEC to withdraw his certificate of return and issue a new one to Adegboyega Oyetola of the All Progressives Congress.
However speaking on the development, a former Director, Voter Education and Publicity, INEC, Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, stated that there should not have been a discrepancy in the 2022 Osun State governorship election.
He explained 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, however, pointed out that the judgment was not a unanimous judgement.
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,” he said while speaking on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily.
Osaze-Uzzi, however, described the judgement as a validation of the role BVAS has played in enhancing the electoral process.
Rather than view the discrepancy from a negative perspective, he encouraged stakeholders to take a more optimistic outlook, arguing that BVAS exposed the over-voting in the election.
According to him, there is a need to break the verdict of the tribunal. He added 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.
“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,” Osaze-Uzzi said.
