On January 27, 2023, the Osun State Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Osogbo voided the election of Ademola Adeleke as Governor of Osun State and declared Adegboyega Oyetola as winner of the July 16, 2022 Governorship Election in Osun State. In a majority judgement delivered by Justice Terste Kume, the Tribunal held that the petitioner, Adegboyega Oyetola was able to prove that over voting took place in 749 polling units and consequently voided the results of the affected polling units.
The tribunal after deducting the excessive votes declared that the figure Ademola Adeleke polled came down to 290,666 votes, which is lower than the 314,921 votes polled by Oyetola. It therefore declared Gov. Oyetola winner.
This is a landmark judgement in the BVAS era and exposes a soft underbelly in our electoral system that we must pay serious attention to - over voting. Out of the 3,010 polling units in the state, over voting were established in 749 of them. That is around a quarter of the total polling units in the state!
What this clearly reveals is that despite the presence of the BVAS deployed by INEC, the actual voting were still manipulated massively. The difference between the initial tally of votes for both candidates and the new tally of votes after cancellation of results from the 749 polling units is 172,811 votes. The total votes for the two major candidates went down from 778,398 votes to 605,587 votes. This is massive by any standards.
This has become a huge problem to be tackled by both the electoral umpire and the political parties. Section 51 of the Electoral Act (as amended) is clear on what happens if over voting is established in a polling unit, which is outright cancellation of the result. Political parties must therefore redouble their efforts in election monitoring. The role of their polling unit agents is now more important than ever to checkmate the conduct of the presiding officers and other INEC adhoc workers in every polling unit.
To avoid incidents of over voting, there has to be a way to ensure that it is only a voter whose verification was successful that is given a ballot paper to thumbprint. This means that INEC needs to allow polling unit agents of political parties to see *every successful verification and authentication* of a voter's card before a ballot paper is issued to the voter. This way you'll eliminate the incidence of over voting.
Also, at the close of voting, the presiding officer or his assistant in charge of the BVAS device must announce the total number of accredited voters and show same to each polling unit agent of political parties before sorting and counting of votes begins. The polling unit agents will then check the number of ballot papers issued out from the ballot paper booklet and ensure it tallied with the number of accredited voters.
The Independent National Electoral Commission on its part should equally strengthen the Ward collation process and ensure that any result from any polling unit where the number of votes is higher than the number of accredited voters is cancelled outrightly and if in the end the result from these polling units will affect the determination of a winner in a case where the vote difference between the two leading candidates is smaller than the possible votes from the cancelled polling units, a fresh election would then be conducted in those affected polling units.
It is good that Osun happened and the issue of over voting highlighted. This would give political parties ample time to train their polling unit agents on things to expect and monitor more closely to avoid rendering the hard earned votes of the political parties and their candidates useless because of over voting. It would also give INEC the opportunity to tweak their guidelines to forestall such incidents. A stitch in time they say, saves nine.
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