The Osun State chapter of the All Progressives Congress, APC, has accused the Peoples Democratic Party in the state of attempting to hack into the data base of the Independent National Electoral Commission so as to corrupt the data of thousands of voters in order to disenfranchise them in the August 9 governorship polls.
The Director of Publicity Research and Strategy of the APC in Osun State, Mr. Kunle Oyatomi, made the allegation in a statement in Osogbo, the state capital, on Tuesday.
Mr Oyatomi also alleged that the PDP aimed to use the same strategy to rig the June 21 governorship polls in Ekiti.
He, therefore, urged INEC to be vigilant and prevent the alleged attempt to subvert the will of the majority in the two states.
The statement read, “A new strategy is under way by the Peoples Democratic Party to rig the June 21 and August 9 gubernatorial elections in Ekiti and Osun states respectively.
“According to the All Progressives Congress in the Osun State, information at their disposal revealed that the PDP plans to hack into the Independent National Electoral Commission’s data-base in order to corrupt the voter register and disenfranchise thousands of voters by eliminating their names from the register.
The ruling party in the state further claimed that the PDP had started deceiving unsuspecting voters by asking for the PIN numbers of their voter cards.
He said that the strategy used for this dubious purpose was by posing as INEC officials and calling voters asking the unsuspecting ones among them to confirm their voter cards’ PIN numbers for security reasons.
He added, “But the actual reason is to eliminate the voters’ data from INEC’s data-base after it must have been hacked into and corrupted”.
But the State Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Mr. Bola Ajao, described the APC’s allegation as a tissue of lies.
Ajao said, “It is bizarre that APC will resort to shadow chasing, mudslinging name-calling etc against the very popular saying ‘he who lives in a glass house should not throw stones’. It is apparent that defeat is staring them in the face come August 9, 2014.
“However, he who alleges must prove. We challenge APC to prove this very wild allegation, which is tantamount to subversion. We must state emphatically that we are not in the mould of fake police report to procure court judgment.
“We also challenge APC to deny the incontrovertible evidence that we have about a state commissioner who is involved in gun running and how a commissioner and a prominent traditional ruler were used to facilitate the granting of bail by the police authorities to their link man”.