Dino Melaye, a former chairman of the Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory, rejected the Ekiti State presidential election result on Monday, claiming that voters had cast too many votes.
Melaye, who is also an agent for the People’s Democratic Party, made the observation that the figures of results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission for Ekiti State do not correlate prior to the beginning of the collation process.
Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, was declared the winner of Ekiti State by INEC with 201,494 votes, defeating Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, the candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, with 89,554.
Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party received 264 votes, while Peter Obi of the Labour Party received 11,397 votes. Bypassing the Bimodal Voter Accreditation Systems and over-voting resulted in the cancellation of 1703 votes.
However, in making his observation, Melaye stated that the PDP’s calculations revealed a discrepancy of 887 in the total number of figures from Ekiti State.
The agents of the Action Alliance, Kenneth Udeze, and the Labour Party, Umar Farouk, agreed with Melaye’s observation. However, INEC chairman Prof. Mahmood Yakubu insisted that the commission stood by the result declared by Prof. Akeem Olawale Lasisi, the collation officer of Ekiti State and Vice Chancellor of the Federal University of Health Sciences, Ila Orangun, Osun State.
“I still insist that the total number of accredited voters for the presidential election in Ekiti state, as reported by the state collection officer, is 315,058. This is what’s in the spreadsheet we looked at yesterday. Additionally, this is what is recorded by the scope and signed by the PDP agent and other political party agents in Ekiti state on the actual result manual.
“Having said that, let us move forward on that one; I’ve taken note of your observations. But what we have here confirms everything I said. The official result cannot be surpassed by any other figure that differs from this one. Let’s move forward.”
However, Melaye continued and nearly halted the collection of results in the state of Kwara.