People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Governorship Candidate, Asue Ighodalo, has served notice of approaching the electional tribunal to retrieve the mandate he believes was stolen from him in Edo State’s September 21 governorship election.
Ighodalo says he is confident of winning his case at the Edo State Election Petitions Tribunal, after losing to Monday Okpebholo of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Speaking on Channels TV recently, Ighodalo said the election that produced Okpebholo as Governor-Elect was neither free nor fair and frontally and accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and police operatives of subverting the will of Edo people.
PDP at the polls harvested 247,274 votes, to Okpebholo’s 291,667 votes.
Second runner-up was Olumide Akpata, the candidate of the Labour Party (LP), who could only manage 22,763 votes.
According to Ighodalo, a legal team will be presenting irrefutable evidence, including of over 150 polling units that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was not deployed.
He said: “There is a lot of data, information, and evidence that we have. We are fully confident that going through the tribunal, we will win the case.
“We will regain our mandate and we are clear without any doubt that we are the winners of the election last Saturday.
“We didn’t rig. When APC and INEC saw that APC was losing woefully, they then subverted the electoral laws and the guidelines.
“Collations are done at the polling units and then you go to the ward and then the local government collation centre and then the state. There was a jump, from the ward straight to the state.”
