The Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja on Thursday dismissed the appeals filed by the All Progressives Congress, APC, governorship candidate, Olorogun O’ tega Emerhor, and his Labour Party counterpart, Chief Great Ogboru challenging the judgement of the Delta state Governorship Election Petition Tribunal which affirmed Governor Ifeanyi Okowa’s election.
It will be recalled that Ogboru and Emerhor had filed their petitions before the tribunal challenging the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC’s declaration of Okowa of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP as winner of the poll. The two appellants had alleged that there was over-voting as the number of total votes recorded exceeded the number of voters accredited by the card reader machines.
Also alleging that the conduct of the poll did not substantially comply with the provisions of the Electoral Act, they urged the tribunal to nullify the April 11, 2015 poll and order a rerun.
However, the tribunal sitting in Asaba, in its judgment delivered on October 26, 2015, dismissed the petitions for lacking in merit.
Ogboru and Emerhor further appealed to the Court of Appeal which heard the case in Benin on December 17 but relocated to Abuja to deliver its judgment on Thursday and has now dismissed the appeals.
In separate judgments by the five-man bench presided over by Justice Uwani Abba-Aji on Thursday, the appeal court held that the appeals lacked merit and that the tribunal was right to have dismissed the separate petitions filed by Emerhor and Ogboru.
Justice Abba-Aji in the lead judgment of the Court of Appeal held that Ogboru merely relied on records of the card reader accreditation without demonstrating the documents by credible evidence.
Abba-Aji held that the appellant needed to have proved that the card reader machines functioned optimally in all the polling units of the state before he could solely rely on the accreditation by the card reader, adding that Ogboru never challenged the evidence of the respondents and even his own witnesses that the card readers had challenges in many part of the states and that apart from the use of card reader, there was also manual accreditation.
In the judgment on Emerhor’s appeal, the appeal court held that held that the most authentic way of proving over-voting is by relying on the voter register which the appellant failed to tender or rely on.
