From Paul Osuyi, Asaba
All Progressives Congress (APC) in Delta State has described the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state as a petrified party following attempts to verify the voting results with the Bimodal Verification Accreditation System (BVAS) machines in the just concluded governorship election.
Commissioner for Information in the state and spokesman of the PDP presidential campaign council, Charles Aniagwu, had raised the alarm that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) issued stringent guidelines to resident electoral commissioners (RECs) on the issuance of Certified True Copies (CTCs) of electoral documents for litigation by parties and candidates.
According to Aniagwu, the national leadership of INEC was specifically directing its RECs to compare the result in form EC8A with what is recorded on the IReV portal before issuing CTCs, which he contended, would circumvent the wheel of justice.
Reacting to the PDP’s alarm, the APC said the ruling party in Delta State was planning to cover up its tracks after allegedly rigging the governorship poll.
Deputy Director, Media and Publicity of Delta APC campaign organisation, Timi Tonye, in a statement, said the demand by Aniagwu and the PDP that RECs should issue CTCs without reference to the portal was outrageous and against the provisions of the 2022 Electoral Act.
“Aniagwu is demanding from INEC, a blatant breach of the provisions of the electoral law which spells out clearly the process of collating and announcing the results of the governorship election.
“It is most ridiculous for anyone to request INEC not to implement the electoral law and INEC’s own rules in regard to issuing of CTCs of results of the governorship election in Delta State.
“It is even more absurd to impugn ‘circumvention of justice’ in the statement the PDP issued when in truth they are the people attempting to pervert justice by their now notorious BVAS by-pass in the just concluded elections.
“The impudence and mendacity of that demand is offensive and deeply insulting to the sensibilities of the Delta State electorate that have been cheated out of the true results of the election they keenly participated in.
“The PDP, their sympathisers and co-travellers are aware of the egregious falsifications of the results of the Delta State governorship election and the utter falsehood in the announced results, wants the bogus and falsified results published by the collation officers in the state’s INEC office to stand and not controverted by the correct counts of accreditations recorded by IReV.
“The party does not want the upload of results from across the state into the national database BVAS to be used to verify the results published by the Delta State collation officers. This is the reason PDP wants the CTCs of the election result issued in Asaba.
“The fear of verification of the announced results has petrified the PDP. The sheer volume of the diabolism, rigging and other actions to steal an election PDP clearly lost must be resisted by every patriotic citizen of Delta State,” he said.