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country. In our opinion, such request should have been limited to places where the
appellants had specifically alleged and pleaded that irregularities and fraud had
occurred. The nature of the request conveys the impression that the appellants
were not in possession of the requisite to support the claim and that they were
therefore on a fishing expedition in the hope of finding such evidence. We note
that the appellants should have so positioned themselves that they would or could
identify every polling place that had a problem or where they had identified a
problem rather than just speculate that every polling place had a problem without
any indication of evidence in all of those polling places.
We have catalogued the testimonies of the witnesses, especially of the
complainants to highlight the irregularities those voting centers specified and to
see if they permeated substantial geographical areas of the country; they would
certainly have provided adequate basis for the declaration of nullity of the October
10, 2017 elections, as prayed for by the first and second appellants. But we are of
the opinion that as much as the evidence showed gross irregularities in and at
certain polling centers, they did not demonstrate that, in the absence of other
evidence at other centers, the reported incidents occurred at a substantial
proportions of the centers as would warrant cancellation of the entire elections
and ordering a rerun. This Court believes that for there to be such massive turn
around in the entire electoral process, the appellants were under a legal obligation
to show that these activities occurred not just at a few isolated centers but that
they occurred at most if not all of the polling centers. The records of the NEC show
that there were five thousand three hundred ninety (5,390) polling centers in the
country; more than twenty (20) presidential and correspondingly more than twenty
(20) vice presidential candidates for the only two top executive positions of the
nation; and that there nine hundred eighty-four (984) candidates for the only
seventy-three (73) House of Representatives seats.
This Court had expected or believed, for example, that the political parties
would have deployed observers and agents not just at a few polling centers which
the evidence seems to portray. And even assuming that the political parties did
deploy sufficient observers and agents throughout the country to cover the
elections, they were each expected to at least have a coordinating or monitoring
center where the data from the field could be assessed as they came in from each