The electoral tribunal sitting in Asaba, Delta state has admitted key documents in the last governorship election. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) accreditation report shows that the winner of the Delta state governorship election, Ifeanyi Okowa, had more votes than the number of accredited voters.
Some documents that have been admitted includes ; card readers, accreditation report by INEC. Two INEC officials ;Assistant Director, ICT Department from Abuja headquarters and Chief Planning Officer, Delta State office have been directed to testify about what happened during the April 11th election.
The candidate of All Progressive Congress (APC) has been challenging the votes results since it was announced, refuting the claim that Ifeanyi Okowa won the election.
In the testimony of the INEC officials, they said;
All documents tendered were duly certified by INEC, that the card reader has three (3) functions to with; identification of voters, verification of PVC holder and voter’s authentication on Election Day.
The card readers recorded no sustained failure during the governorship election in delta state and accredited numbers of voters as at April 29th was 709,000 and at the expiration of the shutting down of data upload, the final tally was 715,393
But on April 13, Delta State INEC had put the figure of accredited voters at 1,017,796, exceeding actual accreditation number revealed by the admitted report obtained from INEC central server
Ifeanyi Okowa was announced winner of the election on April 13th, 2015 by the INEC returning officer, Bio Nyananyo, and he won by 724,680 votes, which is 14,980 more than accredited voters
Also a manual was presented to the tribunal by INEC, the manual is the guidelines for officials in the 2015 election, which states that all accreditations for governorship election must be done only through card readers, and it is mandatory all officials follow the guidelines.
Ifeanyi Okowa had tried to stop the INEC officials' testimony and also for the documents not to be admissible in the tribunal, but all were strongly objected by the tribunal.