Voters waited patiently for the election date which was February 25, 2023 and begun queuing at the polling unit around 6am. INEC officials arrived late without a security personnel. As at 12pm the list of voters on queue was over six hundred (600 plus).
Accreditation and voting commenced. There was no security personnel and community leaders contacted the police who sent an officer.
At about 2pm some APC card carrying members and leaders in the community arrived the polling unit bent on causing confusion.
They positioned someone with a camera to video cover their disruption, while one of them went to the front and began shouting that they were going to make sure the unit’s election was cancelled.
Voters resisted their advances and the process was not obstructed.
Voting continued into the night. About 10pm, the BVAS machine indicated that voting time had elapsed and went off. It was not that the battery had no power.
With the assurance of the INEC chairman that all voters on queue as at 2pm must be allowed to vote, voters sat down to wait for what INEC officials would do.
INEC officials at the polling unit tried to contact their superiors who could not be reached on phone.
Voters tried all the INEC phone lines but none went through.
The officials at the polling unit suggested that we count results and upload but upon being informed that once the box is opened there can be no further voting, it was resolved that some delegates be sent to the INEC office that night to see the people who could not be reached at the time.
Since the other polling close by with many voters had the same problem, delegates went to the office together, but the officials in question were not there and could not be reached. It was resolved that a place be provided for the officials and security personnel to sleep in custody of the election materials until morning when we will hear from their superiors.
In the morning, their phone lines were not going through, arrangements were on the way to visit the office again and then they arrived at our polling unit.
They told us that they were aware of the situation and that we could call voters who were on queue but went home who come back and vote however, the machine will be opened by a superior in Abuja, so we needed to wait.
While waiting, we were informed that the request to turn on the machine for voters on queue (some who slept in the premises) was declined.
Though we were not happy, it was resolved that the ballots be counted, results written and transmitted.
The counting was completed, LP worn with over 500 votes, APC and PDP had a combined vote of less than 50.
All attempts to upload result proved abortive, until evening when it was learnt that it was a general problem.
We waited to see the results uploaded. I checked the INEC iREV result platform and to my surprise, I saw a very different result.
The total number of valid votes is 187 and APC won with 130 votes. Other parties shared 57 votes with LP coming a distant third with 17 votes and PDP with 31 votes.
The result sheet on which the result was written was meant for another unit (Rusai Village II) with number 065. If this is a misplaced upload, where is our result? So, what happened?
Voters were deliberately disenfranchised on two levels.
Many voters whose PVCs were produced by INEC got missing in INEC’s custody and voters could not receive them.
INEC told them that it lodged a complaint against itself to itself. The offender is the judge. INEC needs to explain how PVCs produced by them could go missing in their custody, especially with videos emerging of tens of thousands of PVCs packaged and thrown away.
I believe that compromised INEC officials are behind this. And if so, they are a threat to our democracy and this act should be regarded as treason.
INEC’s insistence that only voters whom they have given PVCs should vote means that they want to disenfranchise those voters whose PVCs it threw away or hid, even though the BVAS machine could accredit them for voting.
If they go ahead and vote because the machines accredited them, INEC would invalidate the entire result because the number of PVCs received would be less than the number of accredited voters. Even eligible voters who spent a whole day on queue were denied their voting rights by INEC.
The failure to send security personnel to the unit from INEC appears to have been deliberate. This is because the absence of a security personnel would have invalidated the entire voting and rendered it an exercise in futility. The same premises has two polling units. The other had less than 100 voters with a security personnel while the other which had close to a thousand voters on queue had none. Was it a plan to invalidate the highest number of votes?
It appears that the INEC servers for uploading presidential election results were turned off and many INEC staff at the polling units were either denied password for uploading results, or were given wrong passwords to keep them from uploading results from polling units, while the wrong people with predetermined results were given the right password to impute results manually.
This explains why the right officials could not upload results and the wrong results were uploaded.
Though the election witnessed massive turn out of voters, INEC’s disenfranchisement of voters and mutilation of results ensures that this election does not capture the massive voter turnout as earlier indicated by massive voter registration.
The strange result uploaded in the name of our polling unit shows that less than half of the people who actually voted on that day came out to vote. This explains why despite media report of massive voter tun outs, the transmitted results do not reflect such.
Why would INEC begin voting late with assurance that everyone on queue at a particular time will eventually vote while programming BVAS machines to stop work at a particular time? It appears the game plan was to disenfranchise voters in identified polling units with many voters in strongholds of the opposition.
Unanswered questions remain: who uploaded the wrong result for our polling unit? Who gave the person the result sheets and passwords to upload? Who signed the fake results? Who was this actor acting for?
The result is that the rights of a thousand unit in one polling unit have been denied and a wrong winner named from the polling unit. Since this is not unique to this polling unit, it translates into massive disenfranchisement of voters, massive rigging and the announcement of a false winner.
Anga writes from Jos