Just two weeks after the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal confirmed President Bola Tinubu’s victory in the elections of February 25, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, the candidates for the PDP and Labour Party, filed 86 grounds for appeal with the Supreme Court to overturn the decision.
In separate appeals submitted on Tuesday, the two candidates argued that the PEPT decision should be overturned and that Tinubu’s election should be declared invalid.
Atiku’s appeal was predicated on 35 arguments in which he criticized the tribunal’s decision regarding the electronic transmission of results, the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory, and other crucial tenets.
On the other hand, Obi criticized the verdict from September 6 on 51 different grounds.
The justices ruled that the documentary and oral evidence did not support the petitioners’ assertions of anomalies, dishonest behavior, non-compliance with electoral laws, and other issues for which they had requested that the court declare Tinubu’s election invalid.
The declaration and return of Tinubu by the first respondent (INEC) as the winner of the presidential election held on February 25, 2023 is unlawful, wrongful, unconstitutional, undue, null and void, and of no effect at all, according to Atiku and the PDP, who are also asking the Supreme Court to rule that Tinubu was not duly elected by a majority of votes cast in the election.
The appellants further want the court to rule that the second respondent was ineligible to run in the election at the time it was held.
Additionally, they are pleading with the court to declare Atiku, the first appellant, “having scored the majority of lawful votes cast in the presidential election, be returned as the winner of the said election and be sworn in as the duly elected President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” (having received the majority of valid votes cast).
Alternately, the PDP candidate is requesting a court injunction instructing the election body to hold a runoff between him and Tinubu.
In the first ground of the appeal, Atiku claimed that the tribunal erred by declining to accept his argument regarding the Electoral Act of 2022’s requirement for the transmission of results electronically.
According to Atiku, the Electoral Act used technology in the conduct of elections, notably in the transmission and collation of results, making this portion of the process particularly vulnerable to fraud and tampering.
“Failure to comply with the said prescription of electronic transmission of the said election result in the polling units by the Presiding Officers amounts to non-compliance with the provisions of section 60(5), section 64(4), and section (5) of the Electoral Act,2022 which requires the transfer of the election results in the polling units by the Presiding Officers in the manner prescribed by INEC,” he continued.
Both Atiku and the PDP argued that the lower court committed a legal error by refusing to declare the presidential election invalid for violating the Electoral Act of 2022. According to the evidence presented to the court, the first respondent had conducted the election using “the doctrine of legitimate expectation,” which is a very serious and gross misrepresentation.
Obi requests, among other things, that the Supreme Court grant his appeal and overturn the “perverse judgment” of the lower court in his notice of appeal, which was submitted by his primary attorney, Dr. Livy Uzoukwu, SAN.
Obi expressed his dissatisfaction with the panel’s whole conclusion, in particular pages 3–327 of the judgment, with the exception of the findings in the appellants’ favor.
He argued that the tribunal justices erred when they determined that the petitioners had failed to identify the specific polling places where the alleged irregularities and malpractices took place or to provide the numbers of votes or scores that they claimed had been tampered with, inflated, or suppressed.
The petition’s paragraph 72, which the court claimed was vague, was disputed by Obi and the LP, who insisted that it was a complaint of excessive voting in polling places in 13 different states, including Ekiti, Oyo, Ondo, Taraba, Osun, Kano, Rivers, Borno, Katsina, Kwara, Gombe, Yobe, and Niger, along with “full and specific itemization in the forensic report produced/offered
IReV and the electronic transfer of polling unit results to IReV are provided for under sections 41 (1), 47 (2), 50 (2), 62 (1) and (2), 64 (4) (a) and (b), (5), (6) (c) and (d), (7), and 152 of the Electoral Act 2022, according to Obi’s argument.
Regarding the purported criminal conviction of the former APC presidential candidate for drug selling by a US court, the appellants further argued that “the justices erred in law and contradicted themselves.”
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