Following the recent ruling of the Osun State Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has issued a statement addressing the discrepancy related to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
TalkGlitz had reported that the Tribunal in a ruling on Friday sacked Ademola Adeleke as the governor of Osun State, and declared Oyetola as the governor.
Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, former Director of Voter Education and Publicity for INEC, spoke about the matter on Channels Television, revealing that the ruling party, APC, had obtained a certified copy of the initial server report before some of the data was transmitted from the BVAS hardware.
He stated that there should have been no discrepancy in the 2022 Osun election results and that the judgement was not a unanimous decision.
“The second [tribunal] 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,’” the INEC official said.
“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.”
The INEC official views the judgement as a validation of the role that BVAS played in improving the electoral process.
He suggests that stakeholders should have a more positive outlook and see that BVAS exposed the over-voting in the election.
Osaze-Uzzi also highlighted the need to determine which BVAS report was relied upon in the judgement, the one transmitted to the server or the machine itself.
“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 posed.
He further explained that the majority of the tribunal relied on the initial report and the certified report from the INEC back-end, which was downloaded from the server after being transmitted.
However, a few days later, INEC synchronised the data to ensure all results were transmitted from the BVAS machine to the server.
A problem was discovered and the BVAS report was then downloaded, examined, and it was found that some data was not transmitted to the server.
In conclusion, the INEC official stressed the need to break down the verdict of the tribunal to get a clear understanding of the situation.
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