The court, presided over by the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Mahmud Mohammed, had on January 27, 2015 heard and dismissed the appeal filed by Labour Party’s gubernatorial candidate, Chief Edward Nkwegu, and promised to give its reasons for doing so on Friday. The Court of Appeal which sat in Enugu had earlier upheld the election of Umahi in its judgment in the appeal by Nkwegu who challenged his (Umahi) as winner of the April 11, 2015 governorship election by the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC]. Reading out the reasons for the judgment of the Supreme Court, Justice Chima Nweze held that the appellant failed to prove his allegations of non-compliance because he did not tender the voter’s register; statement of results in the appropriate forms which would show the number of registered accredited voters and the number of the actual voters; and he did not relate each of the documents to the specific areas of his case in respect of which the documents were tendered to show that the figures representing the over-voting, if removed, would result in his victory. “In all, the law on the proof of improper accreditation and over-voting has remained inexorable and has not been whittled down by INEC’s approval of the deployment of the Card Reader Machine procedure. I, therefore, resolve these coalesced issues against the appellant,” his Lorsdship held. The court further held that the electronic Card Reader report could not be relied upon to prove allegation of non-compliance with either Electoral Act or the Guidelines and Manual. Justice Nweze said: “Exhibit GP 45 (The card reader Report) is incomplete, unreliable and incapable of proving the appellant’s allegation of improper accreditation/over-voting. Thus, any attempt to invest it (Card reader Machine procedure) with such overarching pre-eminence or superiority over the voters’ register is like converting an auxiliary procedure into the dominant procedure- of proof, that is, proof of accreditation. “This is a logical impossibility. Indeed, only recently, this court in Shinkafi V Yari confirmed the position that the card reader machine has not replaced the Voters’ register and has not supplanted the statement of results in appropriate forms, hence, the appellant still had the obligation to prove his averments in paragraphs 16, 17, 18 and 19 of his petition relating to accreditation of voters and over-voting as enunciated in several decisions of this court which counsel for the respondents cited profusely.”]]>