Two invited witnesses of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its candidate, Atiku Abubakar have admitted at the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) failed to transmit the results of the election after the collation.
In their joint petition before the PEPC, Atiku and PDP accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of installing a third-party device to distort results of the presidential poll in favour of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and its candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The witnesses, Friday Egwuma and Grace Timothy both ad-hoc staff of INEC said the BVAS machine allocated to them developed a system fault immediately after the results of the Senate and House of Representatives parts of the poll were transmitted.
In their evidence, the INEC workers explained that they had to devise other means of getting the results when it became obvious that the BVAS machines could not do it.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his party, the All Progressives Congress, APC however objected to their testimonies.
Politics Nigeria gathered that Grace Timothy served INEC in Plateau State while Egwuma was a Presiding Officer of a polling unit in Abia State.
However, the two witnesses who were led in evidence by counsel to the petitioners, Chief Chris Uche, SAN, admitted that voting went smoothly in their respective places of work.
Egwuma, under the examination of Abubakar Mahmud SAN, of the INEC further told the court that he made use of an offline system after the BVAS machines failed.
In her own testimony, Grace Timothy told the Court that the greatest challenge she faced was the uploading of the presidential election results into the Inec Result Viewing (I-rev) portal.
The witnesses were also cross-examined by Chief Wole Olanipekun SAN who stood for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Prince Lateef Fagbemi SAN who represented the APC.
In their petition marked CA/PEPC/05/2023, Atiku and the PDP listed INEC as 1st respondent, APC as 2nd respondent and Tinubu as 3rd respondent.
According to Atiku, the said IT Consultant, Suleiman Farouk, ensured that the device was intermediated between the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the portal, known as Device Management System (DMS).
He told the court that the DMS was the software that allowed INEC’s IT Security Consultant, Farouk, remotely control, monitor and filter data transmitted from the BVAS devices to the electronic collation system and the IReV platform.
