The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Friday tendered 1,353 result sheets at the ongoing hearing of the presidential election petitions tribunal.
The tribunal continued with hearing into the petition brought by the PDP challenging the election of President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday.
The tribunal has reached its tenth day, since the beginning of hearing into the PDP’s substantive petition.
At the opening of the session, a lead counsel for the PDP, Chris Uche, said the petitioners had 1,353 additional result sheets to tender before the tribunal.
He added that the result sheets include the polling unit results (form EC8A) and results from ward collation centres (form EC8B)
He said the various results were gotten from the February 23 elections in 11 states.
Mr Uche also noted that the party was yet to sort the results contained in the document provided by INEC on Thursday, following a court order.
According to Mr Uche, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, the form EC8As were 1,266 while the form EC8Bs were 87 in number.
“We have EC8As and EC8Bs. The EC8As are 1,266 and the EC8Bs are 87 in number.
“We have 38 receipts as payments for the documents,” said Mr Uche. The lawyers for the various respondents objected to the admissibility of the documents. They said they would state their reasons in their final addresses.
The tribunal chaired by Justice Garba Mohammed admitted the documents as evidence.
Background
The PDP and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, are currently before the tribunal to contest the stated victory of Mr Buhari at the February 23 general elections.
The party accused the nation’s electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission, of colluding with the ruling All Progressives Congress to rig the poll in favour of the APC.
According to Mr Abubakar, his party won the elections with over 1 million votes from details seen by the petitioners during its investigation.
PDP’s allegations
The PDP specifically accused INEC of refusing to disclose results transmitted to its central server, because the results favoured the party.
That claim has since been denied by INEC. The commission insists it did not use a central server for the collation of results, despite claims to the contrary by some of its staff.
Claims by witnesses
But witnesses for the PDP had in previous testimonies also accused the respondents of falsifying results from various polling units in states like Borno State.
The PDP witnesses had stated in court that thugs working for the APC changed the details of results from polling units after driving opposition party agents away from polling centres.
The petitioners continued with the presentation of witnesses after tendering the result sheets on Friday.
Although the PDP has reached the end of its allotted days for proving its case, the petitioners requested more time from the tribunal to sort out the details contained in documents provided by INEC.
The PDP petition, one of three similar complaints currently before the tribunal, seeks to nullify the re-election of Mr Buhari as Nigeria’s president in the February 23 polls.
The PDP governed Nigeria until 2015 when President Buhari defeated the then incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan.
Mr Buhari, who contested for the position of president four times before succeeding, had also challenged the previous elections in court, without success.
