The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has acknowledged that it has issues with the election result viewing portal and this has affected the upload of results from the various election centres.
This acknowledgement is contained in a press release signed by Festus Okoye, INEC National Commissioner and Chairman Information and Voter Education Committee, on Sunday 26th of February , a day after the Presidential, Senatorial and House of representatives elections.
He said that “the commission is aware of challenges with the INEC Results Viewing Portal. Unlike in off-season elections where the portal was used, it has been. relatively slow and unsteady. The Commission regrets this setback, especially because of the importance of IReV in our results management process.”
“The problem is totally due to technical hitches related to scaling up the IReV from a platform for managing off-season, State elections, to one for managing nationwide general elections. It is indeed not unusual for glitches to occur and be corrected in such situations.”
He said that the technical team was working assiduously to solve all the outstanding problems, and “users of the IReV would have noticed improvements since last night.”
Many voters has expressed with dismay, their dissatisfaction with INEC over the inability of the commission to upload the election results. This has prompted allegations from some quarters as to the veracity of the results.
Some voters even expressed their frustration with the fact that process of using technology and adherence to the agreed electronic transmission of results to INEC servers at polling units was not adhered to, at many polling units. At many polling units, the INEC officials stated that the INEC server was down and was not available for the transmission of the results.
The elections took place on the 25th of February to usher in new officers in the Presidential, Senatorial and House of representatives functions of the country.
One would wonder if the IReV system was stress tested knowing that it would come under heavy usage during the elections.
Prior to the commencement of the election, INEC carried out mock election drills to evaluate and verify the efficiency of the BVAS machines. Following this, the INEC Chairman reassured Nigerians repeatedly that the commission was fully prepared to conduct a technologically-driven, impartial, and transparent election that would be the most credible in Nigeria’s history.
Alas, this was not the case.
A large number of BVAS machines experienced malfunctions at the polling stations, and even those that were functional failed to upload the voting results to the INEC iRev portal, which is the final step in the voting process.
As at the time of writing this report, the country is still expecting results from most of the states to be uploaded.
