The Supreme Court has delivered key Judgement on Electronic Transmission of Election Results.
The Apex Court has said there is no law that requires INEC to transmit election results to the database or backend server of the commission.
This verdict follows a similar judgment by an Abuja Federal High Court on Monday, January 23 in the case involving Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party and the President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Judges at both the Supreme and High courts held that the commission is at liberty to pick any method of transmitting election results.
The Supreme Court has declared that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is not bound to electronically transmit election results.
Delivering judgement on Tuesday, May 9, in the appeal filed by Gboyega Oyetola, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), a five-member panel of the Apex Court emphasised that there is no law that compels presiding officers to transmit the accreditation of the polls to the database or backend server of INEC by the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), as claimed by the appellants.
The Supreme Court stated that the presiding officers of INEC were not bound to instantly transmit election information electronically.
Emmanuel Agim who read the lead judgement said: “Therefore, the case of the appellants that the presiding officers were bound to instantly or on-the-spot transmit the number of accredited voters in the BVAS to the backend server or database of INEC has no support.”
Political pundits opine that one of the implications of the judgment is that any future petition brought on the grounds of INEC’s failure to transmit results may not stand.
It would be recalled that one of the issues raised by Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential candidate in the 2023 election, in his petition challenging the election of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as president-elect is that the failure of INEC to promptly upload the results from polling units through BVAS to IReV portal on the day of the election invalidated the poll.
