A case filed by the Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has been requested to be dismissed by the Presidential Election case Tribunal by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
Bola Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, was declared the winner in a petition brought by Obi and the LP.
They further asserted that Kashim Shettima, Tinubu’s vice presidential nominee and running partner, had received two nominations in violation of the Electoral Act of 2022.
The petitioners claimed that the election was tainted by rigging and manipulations, and that the INEC broke its own rules when it announced the results because all polling unit results had not yet been fully scanned, uploaded, and transmitted electronically as required by the electoral act.
INEC stated in its answer that the reliefs requested by Obi and his party are not grantable.
The commission requested that the petition be dismissed or struck out because it was exceedingly incompetent, abusive, vague, non-specific, confusing, and academic.
INEC stated that the petition’s grounds are ambiguous.
The petitioners’ allegation that Tinubu was not elected by a majority of legitimate votes cast was also dismissed by the commission.
The electoral authority contended that the petitioners’ request to declare Obi the winner based on the majority of legitimate votes cast in the election was faulty due to a failure to join relevant parties and a lack of requisite particulars and pleadings.
According to the commission, Obi cannot be returned as elected since he did not receive a majority of the legitimate votes cast in the election and did not receive one-quarter of the votes cast in at least two-thirds of all states in the federation and the FCT.
On the point of non-representation, INEC stated that the petitioners did not have polling agents in all of Nigeria’s polling units because they only presented a list of 134, 874 polling agents, which is 41, 972 short of the 176, 846 polling units.
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