Atiku asks tribunal to nullify Presidential poll over irregularities

By Vivian Okejeme, Abuja

The Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party(PDP) Atiku Abubakar, has asked the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal to nullify the February 25, general election over alleged irregularities.
The petition before the tribunal sitting in Abuja, marked CA/PEPC/05/2023, mentioned Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) President-elect Ahmed BolaTinubu and All Progressive Congress(APC).
The petitioners through their legal team led by Chief J.K. Gadzama SAN, however reproduced the results of the said election wherein INEC declared Tinubu to have polled 8,794,726 and Atiku polled 6,984,520.
They submitted that going by the results, INEC wrongly returned Tinubu as the winner of the election.
Consequently, they are asking the tribunal to declare the said result as invalid.
They further submitted that on the face of the form EC8S(A),there are calculation errors as shown and contained in the report of the statisticians.
The petitioners said they will be relying the said result as declared by INEC.
In the ground one, the petitioners submitted that the election of Tinubu is invalid by reason of non compliance with the provisions of the Electoral Act , 2022.
They added that INEC failed to electronically transmit the election results.
The petitioners argued that INEC failed to comply with the provisions of Section 66 of the Electoral Act which incorporated Section 134 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 in wrongfully , unlawfully, illegality and unconstitutionally returning Tinubu.
The petitioners contended that the return of Tinubu as duly elected to the office of the president given the margin of lead and the Permanent Voters Card collected is undue wrongful.
In their ground two, the petitioners argued that the election of Tinubu is invalid by reason of corrupt practices .
They submitted that the election conducted by INEC is invalid by reason of corrupt practices.
They further added that the collation of election results in all the states of the Federation was manipulated by INEC through the deliberate suppression and discounting of the lawful votes of the petitioners while inflating the scores of Tinubu and APC.
They added that the manipulation range from suppression of votes, manipulation of ballots and ballot boxes manipulation of BVAS machines , manipulation of accreditation and collation, manipulation of election material delivery and manipulation of election material reverse logistics and intimidation and harassment of voters .
Others highlighted by the petitioners are massive thumb printing of ballot papers , destruction of electoral materials, hijack of electoral materials , mutilations, cancellations and over writings on results sheets and inflation, deflation of scores , and wrong entries in result sheets .
In ground three, the petitioners argued that Tinubu is not duly elected by majority of lawful votes cast at the election.
The petitioners submitted that they lead evidence at the hearing to show that the result of the election as announced by INEC and especially the votes allocated to Tinubu do not represent the lawful valid votes cast at the election.
In ground four , the petitioners contended that Tinubu was at the time of the election not qualified to contest the election , not having constitutional threshold.
The petitioners however prayed the Tribunal to determine that Tinubu was not duly elected by a majority of votes cast in the election and there his declaration and return by INEC is unlawful, wrongful, unconstitutional , null and void.
They pray the Court in the alternative to direct INEC to conduct a second election between Atiku and TInubu.
Also in the further alternative, the petitioners want the Tribunal to order that the election to the office of the President held on February 25 be nullified and a fresh election ordered.