Reacting to the declaration of Buhari as the winner, PDP presidential collation agent, Osita Chidoka said his party does not accept the result as representing the valid votes.
President Muhammadu Buhari was declared winner having scored 15,191,847 votes as against its candidate, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP who scored 11,262,978.
PDP, he said will be will explore all options, including legal process in seeking redress.
So, in our view this election required too be looked at again and possibly we would have had rerun, more importantly, we think that INEC should have looked consciously to the use of the card reader, the absence of card reader is a major violation in the elections, it renders that election null and void, that’s what the chairman promised us.
“So, for us in the PDP, we believe that this is a new low in Nigeria’s electoral history. Since 2015 we believe that Nigeria would have been making progress in the election, but violence in this election, the issues that have arises in this election, lack of transparency that we saw in this election did not increase, neither did it improve the believe of Nigerians in the electoral process.
“However, the PDP remains a very lawful party, we believe in the law, we believe in the constitution of Nigeria, we are committed democrat, PDP is a party that entrenched democracy in Nigeria, the PDP is the party that made it possible for Nigeria to enjoy the fruit and dividend of democracy.
“We will continue to support democracy in Nigeria, we will continue to promote democracy in Nigeria but we have a good message for Nigerians, we want them to remnants peaceful, we will explore all our options, including the believe (sic) that the legal process in Nigeria is one of the ways to resolve issues,” he said.
He further argued that “the PDP does not accept this result as representing the valid votes of Nigerians, we have made three issues; first after all the investment in technology, we required INEC, after spending N27 billion in this year’s budget alone for technology, we had expected that today, INEC would have for the purpose of transparency not just for law would have projected to us the result of what the card reader that they used displayed about the people that went through the card reader verification, that singular at put a dent in the image of the election.
“The second one is the issues we raised about the number of registered vis-à-vis if what the chairman now calls collated voters means that 1.6 million people are missing in the voter register. We think that issue is substantial enough to require a resolution.
We also believed that difference between the accredited voters and the voter votes cast which came to about 750,000 votes requires an issue to be looked at.
“Finally, we believed that the cancellations that took place in the election impacting 2.7 million voters required be looked into seriously.”
INEC chairman on his response noted that the difference in the valid votes and cancellation were insignificant to impact on the general outcome of the election.
He also noted that all the observations raised by the opposition is noted and would be needed for future elections in the country.
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