INEC official tells tribunal how BVAS failed to post-presidential election results.

Five INEC ad hoc staff members who participated in the disputed presidential election told the court that on the day of the election, all efforts to upload polling unit results to INEC's I-Rev portal using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, machines failed.
Five INEC ad hoc staff employees were summoned to testify before the court, but only two were able to do so on Thursday, with three others scheduled for Friday.
PDP said that his name is Egumah Friday and he acted as a presiding officer at a polling unit during the presidential election. However, the legal team of Tinubu and APC told the tribunal that Faga Kehen was the person that was presiding officer in the polling unit Egumah Friday and claimed that he worked during the election. Egumah Friday and Grace Timothy, told the court that they served as Presiding Officers in Abia and Bauchi, respectively, during the general elections. The two witnesses told the tribunal that after the election, they tried to upload the results for the presidential election but it did not go through. However, they told the court that the results of the senate election were uploaded to the portal without any issues. After APC and Bola Tinubu's lawyers.

Though President Tinubu and the APC did not object to the testimony of the second subpoenaed witness, Grace, they did accuse the first witness, Friday, of impersonation.
They told the court that Faga Kehen was the name of the Presiding Officer who was at the polling station that Friday and claimed to have served on election day.
The panel led by Justice Tsammani has postponed further hearings on the case until Friday.
Atiku, who finished second in the presidential election on February 25, said in a joint appeal with his party that the election was manipulated in favour of President Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.
In his 66-page appeal, Atiku accused the Electoral Commission of installing a third-party device that he said was used to intercept and switch presidential election results in favour of the APC and Tinubu.
He also claimed that INEC redeployed its in-house ICT specialist, Mr Chidi Nwafor, before the election and replaced him with an IT Consultant who assisted in the installation of the third-party mechanism.
According to Atiku, the aforementioned IT Consultant, Mr Suleiman Farouk, guaranteed that the Device Management System (DMS) was used to connect the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) to the IRev Portal, According to him, the DMS was the software that enabled INEC's IT Security Consultant, Mr Farouk, to remotely control, monitor, and filter data passed from the BVAS devices to the electronic collation system and the IRev platform.

"The 1st Respondent (INEC) hired a 2nd Respondent (Tinubu) appointee to man and oversee the 1st Respondent's sensitive ICT Department for the Election."The Petitioners contend and will present evidence to demonstrate that, contrary to the original design of the BVAS machine, which was intended to upload data directly to the electronic collation system and the IReV portal, the 1st Respondent devised and installed an intervening third-party device (Device Management System), which is intended to secure and administer the BVAS machine.
Meanwhile, President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress, APC, rejected the invitation of five ad hoc staff members of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to testify as special witnesses in the petition filed by Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, a former Vice President and candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to challenge the outcome of the 2023 presidential election.
President Tinubu, who is the second respondent in the petition attempting to overturn his election victory, stated that he had no awareness of the contents of the assertions made under oath before the court. Tinubu argued, through his legal team led by Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN, that the law required such essential comments to be made ahead of time to allow other parties to appropriately prepare.

President Tinubu, relying on a multitude of determined case laws, said it was not acceptable for Atiku and the PDP, the joint petitioners, to spring a surprise by submitting statements of subpoenaed witnesses midway through the hearing of their case.
As a result, he requested the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) in Abuja to reject the evidence of the five subpoenaed witnesses and not give their testimony any probative value in the case.
The third respondent in the case, the All Progressives Congress, or APC, sided with President Tinubu's viewpoint.
The APC maintained that Atiku should have submitted the written statements of the witnesses when the case was filed through a team of attorneys led by Prince Lateef Fagbemi, SAN.
The head of INEC's legal team, Mr Abubakar Mahmood, SAN, stated that he was also against the court letting the five witnesses who had been subpoenaed to testify in the case because their statements were not included in the petitioners' ab-initio proof of evidence.
Atiku's attorney, Chief Chris Uche, SAN, requested the court to overrule all objections and permit the witnesses to continue giving their testimony.

Uche, SAN, stressed that it would not have been able to front-load the written statements of the subpoenaed witnesses since they were not summoned at the time the petition was filed, saying that the Respondents' concerns highlighted in their objections were misconceived.
The attorney for the petitioners maintained that the witnesses were unique because their attendance in the case was predicated on a court summons.
Although the five-member panel, presided over by Justice Haruna Tsammani, initially adjourned the case to prepare a judgement, it later reconvened and let the petitioners summon the witnesses.
The court announced that it would reserve its decision and issue it later.