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Court Declines Obi's Request To Scan Election Materials

        Gov Peter Obi

The Appeal court on Wednesday declined the request by Labour Party (LP) Presidential candidate, Peter Obi, to scan and make copies of the election materials from INEC ‘s database.

Justice Joseph Ikyegh-led three-member panel said that granting the order sought by Obi would hamper the elections scheduled for Saturday.

Ikyegh faulted Obi and LP for repeating their request to be allowed to scan and make copies of the electoral materials in INEC’s possession.

He held that granting the order would amount to tying down the hands of the electoral body and preventing it from carrying out the functions assigned to it by the 1999 constitution.

The court had on March 3 ordered INEC to allow the applicants to inspect and carry out digital forensic examination of all the electoral materials used in the conduct of the elections.

Also, to provide them the Certified True Copy (CTC) of result of the physical inspection of the BVAS.

The panel held that the request was earlier granted, saying that repeating the prayer amounted to an abuse of court process.

INEC had revealed that the reconfiguration of the BVAS was necessary since they would be deployed for the next round of elections on Saturday.

The commission added that without a prompt variation of the order that the court earlier granted Obi and the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Atiku Abubakar by restraining them from tampering with information contained in the BVAS, that it would be difficult to proceed with the scheduled elections. 

Obi and his party had in their application marked: CA/PEC/09m/23, sought permission to be allowed to conduct physical inspection of all the BVAS that were used for the presidential poll.

The applicants, through their team of lawyers led by Dr Onyechi Ikpeazu (SAN) said the essence of the application was to enable them to extract data embedded in the BVAS, which represented the actual results from polling units.

They specifically applied for leave to carryout digital forensic and physical inspection of BVAS, likewise to obtain the CTC of all the data in the BVAS.

While opposing the application, INEC through its lawyer,  Tanimu Inuwa (SAN) told the court that a total of 176,000 BVAS were deployed to polling units during the presidential election.

“Each polling unit has its own particular BVAS machine which will need to be reconfigured for the forthcoming elections.

“It will be very difficult for us, within the period, to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS.

“We have already stated in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost. We need the BVAS reconfigured.

”So, granting this application will be a cog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections” Inuwa added.
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