Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), in the February 25 election, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of installing a third-party device he said was used to intercept and switch results of the presidential election in favour of ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and its candidate, now President-elect Bola Tinubu.
Atiku, in a 66-page petition lodged before the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), sitting at the Court of Appeal, in Abuja, further alleged that INEC had, prior to the election, redeployed its in-house ICT expert, Mr. Chidi Nwafor and replaced him with an IT Consultant that helped it install the third-party mechanism.
According to Atiku, the said IT Consultant, Mr. Suleiman Farouk, ensured that the device was intermediated between the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the IRev Portal, known as Device Management System (DMS).
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He told the court that the DMS was the software that allowed INEC’s IT Security Consultant, Mr. Farouk, to remotely control, monitor and filter data transmitted from the BVAS devices to the electronic collation system and the IRev platform.
“The 1st Respondent (INEC) engaged an appointee of the 2nd Respondent (INEC) to man and oversee the sensitive ICT Department of the 1st Respondent for the purpose of the Election.
“The petitioners contend and shall lead evidence to show that contrary to the original design of the BVAS machine to upload data directly to the electronic collation system and the IReV portal, the 1st Respondent contrived and installed an intervening third-party device (Device Management System) which, in its ordinary usage, is meant to secure and administer the 1st Respondent’s technological ecosystem for the elections but as it relates to the presidential election, was used to intercept the results, quarantine and warehouse same, and filter them before releasing same to the IReV portal.