By Agency Report
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC on Tuesday opened its defense in the petition filed by Peter Obi and the Labour Party by calling one out 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 making reference to alleged glitches during upload of 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 aren’t clear, physical results can be obtained.
During cross-examination by the counsel for Labour Party, Patrick Ikwueto, the witness agreed that there was a performance and functionality test done on February 4, to identify the vulnerability of the server that INEC worked with.
The witness told the court that the essence of the performance test which was done at the pre-production stage was to determine how the system would perform under heavy usage, and testing was done at the back-end of the server to ensure that the system is 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.
The labour party counsel while referring to a report on the test, said the report identified the remediation to be undertaken to resolve the high vulnerability identified in the results, but the witness who agreed to the existence of the test report said it was not before the court.
The witness further admitted that during the upload of results, anything can happen, but the content of the material to be uploaded would not be affected, when asked if the hard copy of results and the ones uploaded on IREV are same.
After cross-examination of the witness, INEC closed its case, prompting the five-man panel to adjourn to July 5, for Tinubu to open his defense in Peter Obi’s petition.
