A chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC Ekene Enefe has justified why the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC did not transmit election results electronically in the Saturday, February 25th Presidential and National Assembly elections.
According to Vanguard, Enefe claimed that some political parties brought in hackers from Russia and Israel to manipulate the outcome of the 2023 elections.
The APC chieftain, who is also in charge of contact mobilisation in the APC Presidential Campaign Council, disclosed this during an interview on Arise Television’s The Morning Show on Friday.
He also noted that political parties, who lost out on the seat of the presidency, were banking on the electronic transmission of results as a basis for kicking against the result of the election, saying they already knew they were losing.
He said, “Each party has a situation room, they’ve known the results. They knew they were losing and they wanted to cling on something; and what they want to cling on is the transmission of the results to the portal.
“But people do not know how many times the Independent National Electoral Commission server was hacked and attacked. And this was done by political parties that brought in Russian and Israeli hackers (I’m just giving you an intelligence report that I’m privileged to) to hack into INEC server and to transmit the end result and create chaos.
“None of them succeeded and that is why the election, to the best of my knowledge, was not transmitted on INEC server.”
Recall that agents of the Peoples Democratic Party, the Labour Party and some other political parties stormed out of the National Collation Centre on Monday during the collation of the presidential election results at the International Conference Centre in Abuja.
The aggrieved parties had complained that the results presented by INEC weren’t uploaded on the commission’s Results Viewing Portal (IReV), as repeatedly promised by the electoral umpire.
The parties and their presidential candidates have since pledged to challenge the result of the election, that produced the APC candidate, Bola Tinubu, as president-elect, in court
Meanwhile, INEC had uploaded 155,472 results from 176, 846 polling units, six days after the presidential poll. A figure that represents only 88 per cent of results from all the polling units. INEC, in the early hours of Wednesday, declared Tinubu of the APC as the President-elect after polling a total of 8,794,726 votes to win the 2023 presidential election.