The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Tuesday, opened and closed its defence in the petition filed by Peter Obi and the Labour Party by calling one of the three witnesses the commission had earlier called to testify before the Presidential Election Petition Court.
The witness, Dr Lawrence Bayode, an ICT expert who adopted his deposition before the court and was Led in evidence-in-chief by INEC counsel, Abubakar Mahmoud, identified a cloud trail log while referring to alleged glitches during uploading results.
When cross-examined by counsel for APC, Lateef Fagbemi, and that of Tinubu and Shettima, Wole Olanipekun, the witness admitted that the perceived glitches did not affect the upload of the results, and that, where results downloaded from IREV are not precise, physical results can be obtained.
During cross-examination by the counsel for Labour Party, Patrick Ikwueto, the witness agreed that a performance and functionality test was done on February 4 to identify the server’s vulnerability that INEC worked with.
The witness told the court that the essence of the performance test at the pre-production stage was to determine how the system would perform under heavy usage, and testing was done at the server’s back end to ensure that the system was well secured.
He also stated that the functionality test was to know if the system could function optimally.
However, the witness told the court that the server was not vulnerable when asked how vulnerable the server was.
While referring to a report on the test, the labour party counsel said the report identified the remediation to be undertaken to resolve the high vulnerability identified in the results. Still, the witness who agreed to the existence of the test report said it was not before the court.
The witness further admitted that anything could happen during the upload of results. Still, the content of the material to be uploaded would not be affected when asked if the hard copy of the results and those uploaded on IREV are the same.
After cross-examining the witness, INEC closed its case, prompting the five-person panel to adjourn on July 5 for Tinubu to open his defence in Peter Obi’s petition.
