PDP Petitions INEC Chair, Demands Review Of Edo Gov’ship Election Results

The Edo State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has petitioned the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, over alleged “massive irregularities” in the collated governorship election results from 16 local government areas of the State.

Chairman of the party in the State, Dr. Tony Aziegbemi, made the demand in a protest letter addressed to the INEC chairman.

The PDP chairman, in letter titled, “Protest against manufactured vote entries and unjust deduction of PDP votes in the collation of results of Edo State governorship election”, alleged that the electoral officers appointed by INEC for the election “made entries that are totally different from the actual results as uploaded on the INEC IREV, thereby unjustly inflating votes in favour of the APC and deducting the votes of the PDP.”

He cited discrepancies in the votes recorded for his party in local government areas where the APC won with wide margins.

Aziegbemi said, “a simple collation of all the votes recorded in the polling unit [Akoko-Edo] results uploaded on the IREV shows that the APC obtained 25,010 votes while 34,847 votes was recorded in the EC8C declared by the LGA Returning Officer.

“While for the PDP, a collation of the votes from the results uploaded on the IREV is 18,620 but 15,865 was returned on the EC8C declared by the LGA Returning Officer.

“It would interest you that in Ward 9 Akoko Edo LGA, from the 36 Polling Unit results uploaded on the IREV, the total votes obtained by APC is 2,350 while 9104 was entered into the EC8B result for APC. The total votes for PDP is 1,359 while 633 was entered in the EC8B.

“Also, in Ward 6 Akoko Edo LGA, were elections did not hold in Ward 6 Units 12, 17, 15, 18, 14 and 16, results were returned for the said polling units in the Ward Result sheet (EC8B).”

He went further to explain that a simple collation of all the votes recorded in the polling unit results uploaded on the IREV shows that the APC obtained 10,972 votes while 16,760 votes were instead recorded in the EC8C declared by the LGA Returning Officer.

He said, “While for the PDP, a collation of the votes from the results uploaded on the IREV’s 14,485 but 14,658 was returned on the EC8C declared by the LGA Returning Officer.

“It would interest you to note that the collation of the Egor LGA was not done at the designated LGA centre but was moved to the INEC State HQ and the PDP agent was not allowed access to be part of the exercise.”

The Edo PDP chairman also cited examples of alleged deductions of votes from his party’s scores “recorded for Etsako West LAG on the IREV shows that the APC obtained 29,858 votes while 32,107 votes was recorded in the EC8C declared by the LGA Returning Officer.”

He explained: “While for the PDP, a collation of the votes from the results uploaded on the IREV is 16,712 but 17,483 was returned on the EC8C declared by the LGA Returning Officer.

“The above highlighted irregularities which are very apparent are extremely scandalous and a brazen attempt to steal the mandate of the PDP and also a terrible embarrassment to the commission.

“We therefore demand the immediate re-collation and recomputation of the actual results for the various polling units in the above highlighted Local Government Areas in compliance with the INEC guidelines and regulations which mandates that votes from various units and wards be properly collated.”