Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Festus Keyamo has reacted to a report which claimed that the Presidential election in Rivers State was rigged in favour of the All Progressives Congress.
The BBC had reported that “while the official result in this state(Rivers) gave a clear majority to Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), our tally suggested that Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) had actually received most votes in the state by a wide margin.
However, Keyamo in a statement on Tuesday said“the entire result of an election cannot be cancelled due to any alleged malpractice if that malpractice does not SUBSTANTIALLY affect the declared result.
His statement reads,
For the avoidance of doubt, Bola Ahmed Tinubu @officialABAT of the APC beat Peter Obi of LP by a margin of 2,693,193 votes.
So, let me educate the unlearned fellows as to how electoral jurisprudence works so that no one deceives them: If you allege electoral malpractice in just ONE STATE and you do 100 TV documentaries on it, it cannot and will not upturn the overall result of the election in the event that when you subtract or add the result of that ONE STATE to the overall tally, the margin between both candidates will still not be obliterated.
Whilst I am not commenting on any particular Petition pending in court now, I just want to say that the entire result of an election cannot be cancelled due to any alleged malpractice if that malpractice does not SUBSTANTIALLY affect the declared result.
In addition, the type of evidence that may be admissible in court to prove over voting may be substantially different from what is put together to make fanciful documentaries that make the eyes of viewers pop out. So, just sit back and be entertained by documentaries.
