The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has finally opened up formally on the failure to upload results on the viewing portal which remains one of the most controversial aspects of the 2023 presidential election.
Despite the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) working well on election day, uploading the presidential election results to the INEC result viewing portal (IREV) failed.
The IReV failure among other issues made opposition parties and some domestic as well as international election observers question the credibility of the polls.
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But months after the exercise, the electoral body has now explained why uploading of results of the presidential election failed. The explanation is contained in parts of the official report of the 2023 elections, released by INEC on Friday ahead of the first anniversary of the election.
According to INEC, while the results for the House of Representatives and Senate were successfully uploaded, the presidential results failed to upload and instead “returned a HTTP server error response”.
INEC, however, stated that it later fixed the server error and that the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8.55 pm on the 25th of February 2023.
The electoral umpire noted that the glitch experienced in uploading the scanned images of PU presidential election result sheets on 25th February 2023 was due to the inherent complexity within the System, which it stated was difficult to anticipate and mitigate.
However, INEC insisted that the glitch in the upload of the presidential results sheets to iREV did not affect the credibility of the election.
The INEC report reads in part, “The 2023 General Election was generally peaceful and orderly nationwide. Most of the challenges encountered in the preelection, election and post-election periods were discussed in the preceding sections of this Report.
“However, a key challenge that impacted on the public perception of the election and elicited widespread commentary is the failure to upload Polling Unit results of the presidential election to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal in real-time at the close of polls on Saturday 25th February 2023.
“To begin with, 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.