Ex-INEC director acquired an incomplete BVAS report in Osun

Ex-INEC director acquired an incomplete BVAS report in Osun

Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, a former director of voter education and publicity at the Independent National Electoral Commission, has shed more light on the election petitions tribunal’s decision to overturn Ademola Adeleke of the Peoples Democratic Party as the state’s winner in the governorship election of 2022.

The All Progressives Congress candidate Adegboyega Oyetola was given a new certificate of return by INEC after Adeleke’s election was declared invalid by the Osun State Election Petitions Tribunal on Friday.

The disparity in the 2022 Osun State governorship election, as it pertained to the BVAS, was caused by the APC’s acquisition of an incomplete report, according to Osaze-Uzzi, who made the claim during an interview on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily on Monday.

“The second member of the tribunal, the Honourable Justice, who broke ranks with his two colleagues, declared, “I would rather utilize the primary source of this information, and the major source of this data is really the machine itself.

“It is basically a computer. So, rather than go to the server where it transmitted data, I would use the printout from the machine itself,” he said.

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He added, “The machines were tendered, so were the reports from the server, and there ought not to have been a discrepancy, but somewhere along the line, not all the data had been transmitted at the time the APC obtained the certified copy of the initial server report.”

“It was BVAS that exposed that as it were, and the fact that the BVAS report was relied on. But we have to be careful; which of the BVAS reports was relied on? Was it what was transmitted to the server – to the backend – or was it the BVAS itself?”, he further stated.

He said there was a need to break the verdict of the tribunal, adding that the majority of the tribunal members – “the chairman and the second member” – relied on the initial report and the initial report of the backend, duly certified by INEC.

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

“It was downloaded from the server [after it was] transmitted. But a couple of days later – INEC used the word ‘synchronised’, I’m not too sure I like that word, but – you synchronise it and say, ‘Have all the results been transmitted – has all data been transmitted from the machine, BVAS itself, to the server?’

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

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Osaze-Uzzi, however, encouraged stakeholders to be optimistic about the use of BVAS as it exposed the over-voting in the election as ruled by the tribunal, describing the judgement as a validation of the role BVAS has played in enhancing the electoral process.