The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said it was unable to upload the presidential results of the 25 February 2023 election on its due to server error.
INEC stated this in the reports of the 2023 general electiosn released on Friday in Abuja.
According to the commission, “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.”
The commission said the elections were generally peaceful and successful, but acknowledged that 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 February 25, 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 commission said the system, was first used during Nasarawa Central State Constituency bye-election in August 2020 and tested in 105 subsequent elections, including three off-cycle governorship elections, adding that it has tremendously improved public confidence in the integrity and transparency of the Commission’s result management process.
According to the commission, the challenge of uploading the PU presidential election results on the IReV after the presidential and National Assembly elections on 25th February 2023 was unique.
The INEC result viewing portal (IREV) failed to upload the presidential results of the 25 February 2023 election despite the seamless working of the bimodal voter accreditation
The failure of the upload of the presidential results of the 25 February 2023 election led to controversy as most opposition parties, some Nigerians as well as domestic and international election observers raised eyebrows.
It took weeks for the presidential results to be uploaded to IReV, leading to widespread protests by opposition parties and their supporters.
After the results were up-loaded on the IReV, several media and civil society organisations who analysed the results declared that the votes for Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), were padded in Rivers State while those of Peter Obi, candidate of the Labour Party (LP), were slashed.
Tinubu was recorded with 231,591 votes while Obi had 175,071 votes in the official results.
But on the IReV, it showed that Obi won Rivers with about 100,000 votes, though not enough to down turn the national gap of over two million votes between him and Tinubu and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who came second.
However, the INEC maintained that the results was a representation of voters’ actual votes while denying accusations of bias and manipulation.
