Another ad-hoc staff of the Independent National Electoral Commission informs the petition tribunal for the presidential election that he sent results to a central server as instructed by the commission for the 2019 elections.
The witness, Olufemi Ogunride, who described himself as an INEC ad-hoc staff who was trained for three days ahead of the elections, said he received election result sheets from the presiding officer which he transferred into the smart card readers and consequently transmitted into the server.
Mr Ogunride spoke at the presidential election tribunal’s Friday session of hearing the PDP petition challenging the re-election of President Muhammadu Buhari.
“All I know is that the P. O (presiding officer) brought the forms EC8C. I put the information from the form into the smart card reader which I transmitted to the server.”
During further cross-examination, however, Mr Ogunride said he had never seen the said server.
He stated that, based on what he was taught, he just transferred data from the smart card readers to the server.
The PDP had asked that the INEC servers be inspected after alleging that the Commission had manipulated data of the election results in favor of Mr Buhari.
The election tribunal rejected Mr Abubakar’s application last month to inspect the server of INEC, stating that granting such an order would presuppose the court had ruled that the server actually existed.
The tribunal deferred the server’s statement until both teams made a correct argument in the substantive petition, which started last week’s hearing.
INEC had said that it did not use a main server to perform the election, stating that it would contradict the Electoral Act. Despite the statement to the contrary made by some of its presiding officers in the election, INEC maintained the stance.
Some of the presiding officers and their subordinates have since signed an affidavit in favor of Atiku Abubakar, the PDP’s candidate and prime challenger to President Buhari, to testify against the commission.
Journalists also discovered last month that before the presidential election, INEC budgeted nearly N1.5 billion for a server installation.
But the commission told the election tribunal that it didn’t have a server and that Mr Abubakar and his team were mischievous.
A former INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, also informed reporters that during his days there was no server at INEC and expressed doubts about any latest installation of such facilities under Yakubu Mahmood.
Seven other witnesses, in addition to Mr Ogunride, testified in court on Friday.
In a separate testimony by a PDP witness on Friday, the witness said that during the elections in Borno State on February 23, petitioners agents were driven away from all voting units across his local government.
The witness, Umaru Ahmed, testified on Friday as the seventh witness.
Security officers, according to the witness, pursued out PDP agents in polling units across his local government area in Borno State.
Mr Umar indicted security operatives with helping the APC manipulate results in different areas of his local government.
Also in a related declaration, another witness, Hassan Maisarauta, who said he was working for the PDP in Potiskum, Yobe State, claimed that a local government chairman of the APC threatened voters in his local government either to vote for the APC or to have their farms seized.
The court adjourned the hearing until Monday following a request from the PDP that it could not brought before the court by its remaining agents.