The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) insists that the technical glitch that caused the failure of the result upload on its viewing portal did not affect the credibility of the election.
The credibility of the February 25, 2023, presidential election came under scrutiny by opposition parties as well as local and international election observers due to the IReV failure which prevented viewing of the results from polling units in real-time.
But in the official report of the 2023 elections released by INEC on Friday ahead of the first anniversary of the election, the electoral body acknowledged the glitch. It, however, maintained that the credibility of the polls was not affected.
READ ALSO: Why 2023 Presidential Election Results Failed To Upload On IReV – INEC
“By and large, the glitch experienced in uploading the scanned images of PU
presidential election result sheets on 25th February 2023 were due to the inherent complexity within the System, which was difficult to anticipate and mitigate.
“Thereafter, the Commission has made improvements on the IReV and taken
additional steps to build more resilience and undertook additional checks to ensure the stability and optimal operation and performance of the IReV portal.
“Additional quality assurance checks are now done to complement the end-to-end testing of the enter result upload ecosystem before the conduct of any election. However, the glitch in the upload of the presidential results sheets to iREV did not affect the credibility of the election. Agents of political parties and security agents were given copies of polling station results after they were announced in public,” the INEC report partly read.
Also in the report, the electoral body explained why uploading of results of the presidential election failed.
According to INEC, while the results for 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.
