The All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council has described as false, the claims that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) failed to use the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines during the February 25 presidential election.
The APC campaign council, while reacting to the press conferences addressed by the presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP), Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, respectively, on Thursday, said voters were accredited by the BVAS machines during just concluded poll.
The Special Adviser on Media and Communication of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, Dele Alake, said this at a press conference in Abuja on Friday.
Alake said: “The claim that INEC did not use the BVAS is false. Those who voted across Nigeria, including Atiku and Obi, were accredited by BVAS. Save for bad losers that these two people have proven to be, we should rather be celebrating the tremendous improvement the use of BVAS has brought to our electoral process.
“The complaint over the electronic transmission of the result is not supported by law.
“Section 38 of the Electoral Acct 2022 referred to by the PDP and LP has nothing to do with the transmission of election results. Section 60, subsection 2 of the Act deals with the transmission of results and it is at the discretion of INEC. The Act does not contain any mandatory provision regarding the transmission of results.
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“In any case, the process of transmitting results from polling units, whether real-time, two days later or at any time, cannot in any way change the results that have been announced right after the counting in the presence of the parties’ agents and to the hearing of the voters. It is, therefore, nonsensical to insinuate that time variation in uploading results would cause a change in the figures.”
Alake stated that the 2023 presidential election produced unprecedented outcomes and defied conventions, noting that the deployment and use of the BVAS machines was the only reason the elections produced strange outcomes and upsets in many states of the federation.
He said the APC’s loss of Katsina and Lagos to PDP and LP respectively, which he said was contrary to expectations, occurred due to the use of the BVAS.
“Besides the delusional expectations created during the campaigns to hoodwink the public, most PDP leaders knew their party had been decimated by Mr Peter Obi. The South-East and South-South that were traditional strongholds of PDP constituted the core support base for the Labour Party.
“PDP went into this election without its limbs and lied to itself that it could win the race. It is worthy of note that Atiku also accepted this fact during his press conference yesterday when he lamented that his party’s votes in the South-East and South-South regions were carted away by the LP.
“The PDP also found itself in No.3 in Kano, with a former member, Kwankwaso running away with over 900,000 votes.
“How far could the PDP have gone with what was left of it? Not so far as the results of the elections have shown. The members of G5 were key leaders of the party who had substantial political influence. They also went away with their own pound of flesh, leaving a crippled PDP to scavenge for crumbs of votes,” Alake added.
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