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Monday, February 27, 2023

Stand by your words on BVAS, vote cancellation, Dino Melaye tells INEC

Mr Dino Melaye is demanding that INEC displays the results captured on their portal from each polling unit at the collation centre.

• February 27, 2023
Dino Melaye
Dino Melaye

Dino Melaye, a spokesperson for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Presidential Campaign Committee (PCC), on Monday, briefly disrupted activities at the national collation centre for the February 25th presidential election.

Mr Melaye, the PDP agent at the national collation centre,  insisted that the process wouldn’t continue until the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was ready to project the results from its IReV portal.

Mr Melaye asked INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, to display the results captured on the commission’s portal from each polling unit to crosscheck with the manual results being announced by the Resident Electoral Commissioners (REC) from each state during their presentation.

According to him, that is the only way to confirm if votes that were cancelled in part of some states for bypassing the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machine were enforced in accordance with the Electoral Act.

He said, “In accordance with section 47, sub section 3, that wherever the BVAS failed and if they cannot get a replacement, elections should be cancelled in those areas.”

“And as we have seen for the presentation of results from Ekiti yesterday, some places were cancelled as a result of bypassing BVAS. So, the only way to detect that BVAS has been bypassed is for us to see the uploaded result and we insisted that the INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, should show us here now (National collation centre) the uploaded results state by state, just like the way they are displaying the collated results that are being presented,” he added.

Some Nigerians are worried over the delay in uploading results to the commission’s IReV portal. However, INEC has blamed the delay on technical hitches. 

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