The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has officially addressed the issue surrounding the failure of the INEC result viewing portal (IREV) to upload the presidential results of the 25th February 2023 election, despite the smooth operation of the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS).
As reported by Daily Trust and anticipated to be formally released by INEC soon, this explanation is part of the official report on the 2023 elections.
The elections were met with controversy from opposition party members, certain Nigerians, and both domestic and international election observers.
The delay in uploading the presidential results onto IReV sparked widespread protests from opposition parties and their supporters.
Subsequent analysis of the results posted on IReV by various media and civil society organizations suggested discrepancies, notably an inflation of votes for Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, in Rivers State, and a reduction in votes for Peter Obi, the Labour Party (LP) candidate.
Officially, Tinubu was credited with 231,591 votes, while Obi had 175,071 votes in the declared results.
However, the figures displayed on IReV indicated a win for Obi in Rivers State by approximately 100,000 votes, though this margin was not significant enough to alter the national gap of over two million votes between him and Tinubu, as well as the second-place candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
INEC has maintained that the results reflected the sentiments of the voters and has rejected allegations of bias and manipulation. In its report, INEC documented the malfunction of the result viewing portal (IReV) during the presidential poll.
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The report acknowledged that while the elections were generally peaceful and successful, a notable challenge that affected the public perception of the election was the failure to upload Polling Unit (PU) results of the presidential election to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal in real-time at the close of polls on Saturday, February 25th, 2023.
“It is important to note that the IReV portal is one of the most significant innovations introduced by the Commission prior to the 2023 General Election to promote the integrity and transparency of the electoral process. As a public-facing website, the IReV portal shows the images of the original Polling Unit result sheets as recorded in Form EC8A.
“The operational methodology and the concept behind the upload of results to the IReV for public viewing is quite simple. At the end of polls, Polling Unit results (Form EC8As) are scanned and uploaded to the IReV by the Presiding Officer(s). These results are then available for viewing to the public and all stakeholders,” the report stated.
The report highlights that the system, initially utilized during the Nasarawa Central State Constituency bye-election in August 2020 and subsequently tested in 105 other elections, including three off-cycle governorship elections, has significantly enhanced public trust in the Commission’s result management procedures.
It further states that the difficulty encountered in uploading the Polling Unit (PU) presidential election results onto the IReV platform after the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25, 2023, was unprecedented.
“In the troubleshooting process, it was established that there was no issue in uploading the PU result sheets of the Senate and House of Representatives elections through the Election Result Modules. However, there was a problem with uploading the presidential election results to the system.”
“Attempts to upload the results were generating internal server errors, which refer to a significant impairment that usually originate from within an application due to problems relating to configuration, permissions, or failure to create or access application resources correctly.
“Further interrogation of the Election Result Modules indicated that the system is encountering an unexpected configuration problem in mapping the presidential election results uploaded into the system to the participating Polling Units.”
