APC got incomplete BVAS report – Ex-INEC director

A former director of voter education and publicity for the Independent National Election Commission, Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, has shed more light on the election petitions tribunal’s ruling that dismissed People’s Democratic Party Ademola Adeleke as the winner of the state’s 2022 gubernatorial election .

The Osun State Election Requests Tribunal ruled on Friday, voiding Adeleke’s election and instructing INEC to revoke its certificate of return and issue a new certificate to Adegboyega Oyetola of the All Progressives Congress.

But during an appearance on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily on Monday, Osaze-Uzzi said the discrepancy in the 2022 Osun state governorship election, as far as it related to the BVAS, was due to the fact that the APC obtained an incomplete report on which the judgment was based. based.

“The second member [of the tribunal] – the Honorable Judge disagreeing with 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.

“It’s actually a computer. So instead of going to the server it sent data to, I would use the printout from the machine itself,” he said.

He added: “The machines were tendered, as were the reports from the server, and there should have been no discrepancy, but somewhere down the line not all data had been sent by the time the APC received the certified copy of the first server report. .”

“It was BVAS that kind of exposed that, and the fact that the BVAS report was being relied upon. But we must be careful; which of the BVAS reports has been relied upon? Was it what was sent to the server – to the backend – or was it BVAS itself?” he continues.

He said it was necessary to break the tribunal’s verdict, adding that the majority of the tribunal members – “the chairman and the second member” – relied on the first report and the first report from the backend, duly certified by INEC.

Osaze-Uzzi explained that the APC obtained a certified copy of the first server report that the remaining data was sent by the BVAS hardware.

“It has been downloaded from the server [after it was] sent. But a few days later – INEC used the word “synchronized”, I’m not sure I like that word, but – you sync it and say, “Has all the results been sent – ​​has all the data been sent from the machine, BVAS itself, to the server?’

“The machine is a physical machine and then transferred to a physical machine. It now went, checked and said, ‘There’s a problem here.’ The BVAS report has now downloaded itself, [we] now brought it out and examined every BVAS machine and now found out that no, some data was not sent to the server,” the ex-INEC director said.

However, Osaze-Uzzi encouraged stakeholders to be optimistic about the use of BVAS as it exposed overvotes in the elections as determined by the tribunal, describing the judgment as a validation of the role BVAS has played in improving the election process.