In a bid to reclaim what it has described the ‘stolen mandate’ of its presidential candidate in the 2019 general election, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of replacing all the servers at its headquarters in Abuja and all its offices in the 36 states of the federation in a bid to obliterate the authentic result of the elections.
Kola Ologbodiyan, National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, made the revelation in a statement made available to OpenLife on Monday.
He said: “The PDP has been well briefed on how the INEC leadership and officials of the Buhari Presidency became jittery and resorted to the desperate measures, after they realised that the servers have information of Atiku Abubakar’s victory at the election.
“Our party also has details of how the INEC leadership and the Presidency agents procured and detailed computer experts to the commission’s offices to switch the servers, mutilate vital information in the system and attempt to erase all trails of transmitted results to the main server.
“Moreover, our party has been informed about how the INEC leadership, several weeks after the election, used some compromised officials of the commission to manipulate voter registers in some states by ticking names of individuals who did not participate in the presidential election as having voted.
“This is with the view to using such to cover the fictitious results it wrote for the APC. What INEC and the Buhari Presidency do not understand is that computer software and applications leave traces, signatures as well as footmark. Forensic investigation of the system will reveal the real votes transmitted from the polling centers, which show Atiku Abubakar as the winner of the election.
“The PDP therefore, insists on forensic examination of all relevant documents and equipment used for the presidential election.”
It would be recalled that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the February 23, 2019 presidential election, said he defeated Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) with a vote margin of 1,615,302 as indicated in INEC official results.
On February 27, 2019, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared that Buhari polled 15,191,847 of the total votes cast while Atiku racked up 11,262,978 votes. This translates to Buhari defeating Atiku with a vote margin of 3,928,869.
However, Atiku rejected the official results from INEC and vowed to upturn the verdict in court. He had also called the entire election a sham and an emasculation of democracy.
On Monday, March 18, 2019, Atiku’s legal team formally filed a petition at the election tribunal.
Part of Atiku’s 139-page petition reads as follows: “from the data in the 1st respondent’s (INEC’s) server…the true, actual and correct results” from “state to state computation” showed that Atiku polled a total of 18,356,732 votes to defeat Buhari who scored 16,741,430 votes”.
Team Atiku also claimed that the figures were the total votes scored by the candidates in 35 states and the Federal Capital Territory Abuja, as there was “no report on sever” about the results from Rivers State as of February 25, 2019, the report reads further.