The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has stated that the 2023 general elections were free, fair, credible, and in line with the Electoral Act 2022.

The declaration is in response to accusations that the commission failed to abide by its own guidelines on the mode of collation of results in the last presidential election.

INEC’s stance on the conduct of the election is also a reaction to a petition by the Action Peoples Party (APP) before the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC) in Abuja.

APP is contesting the outcome of the presidential poll and the emergence of Bola Tinubu as the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on the grounds of alleged substantial non-compliance with the electoral laws of Nigeria, as well as breach of the INEC guidelines.

Replying to the suit via one of its lawyers, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN), a former President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), INEC insisted that the conduct of the presidential election was free and fair.

“The election was free, fair, credible and in compliance with the constitution and the Electoral Act, 2022 and other relevant laws and guidelines,” it said.

Dismissing APP’s argument that results collation were to be done electronically, the electoral body cited paragraphs 50 to 55 of the regulations and guidelines for the conduct of the 2023 presidential election.

“There was no collation system of the 3rd respondent (INEC) to which polling unit results were required to be transmitted by the presiding officers…the prescribed mode of collation was manual collation of the various forms EC8A, EC8B, EC8C, EC8D and EC8E in the presidential election,” INEC noted.

It also denied the allegation that results were doctored by its officials to favour a particular political party’s candidate or that there was over-voting.

Speaking further, INEC stated that its online result viewing portal became erratic at the point of collation and members of its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) team were called in to rectify the problem.

It added that the above was the reason the presidential results were not immediately uploaded.

“It was observed that while the result sheets were being successfully uploaded through the e-transmission system to the iRev portal in respect of the Senatorial and House of Representatives elections to their respective modules, the e-transmission was not processing and uploading the result sheets to the iRev portal in respect of the presidential election. The system was encountering glitches and was extremely slow.

“The 3rd respondent’s (INEC) technical team took every step to restore the application to functionality…five application/patches updates were created and deployed immediately with the aim of fixing the error.”