About a year after the 2023 presidential election, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has explained why it’s viewing portal (IREV) failed to upload the results of the February 25 polls.
The failure occurred despite the seamless working of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
INEC’s explanations were contained in it’s official report on the 2023 general election.
Politics Nigeria reports that the 2023 presidential election was considered controversial by some citizens.
This was largely because, among other things, it took weeks for the presidential results to be uploaded to IReV, leading to widespread protests by opposition parties and their supporters.
There were also cases of results being inflated to favour some candidates.
The commission, in the report documented the failure of the result viewing portal (IReV) during the presidential poll.
According to the report, while the elections were generally peaceful and successful, however, a key challenge that impacted on the public perception of the election and elicited widespread commentary is 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 25th February 2023.
The report reads in parts: “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.
“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.”
All these moronic jargon just to fool the foolish. Thank you. Everyone already knows the real truth.