Politics
Supreme Court gives a key Judgment on the Electronic Transmission of Election Results.
Supreme Court gives a key judgment on the electronic transmission of election results.
The Supreme Court has declared that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is not bound to electronically transmit election results.
Delivering judgment on Tuesday, May 9, in the appeal filed by Gboyega Oyetola, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), a five-member panel of the apex court emphasized that there is no law that compels presiding officers to transmit the accreditation of the polls to the database or backend server of INEC by the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), as claimed by the appellants, The Cable reported.
Emmanuel Agim, who read the lead judgment, said: “Therefore, the case of the appellants that the presiding officers were bound to instantly or on-the-spot transmit the number of accredited voters in the BVAS to the backend server or database of INEC has no support.”
Political pundits opine that one of the implications of the judgment is that any future petition brought on the grounds of INEC’s failure to transmit results may not stand.
It would be recalled that one of the issues raised by Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential candidate in the 2023 election, in his petition challenging the election of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as president-elect is that the failure of INEC to promptly upload the results from polling units through BVAS to the IReV portal on the day of the election invalidated the poll.
