INEC speaks on alleged manipulation of results on IReV

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Tuesday said it did not tamper with any result or data on the election result viewing portal (IReV).

The commission said it had observed media reports accusing it of tampering with the figures of accredited voters in last Saturday’s Kogi State governorship election.

Kogi is one of the three states where off-cycle governorship elections held on Saturday. The two other states were Bayelsa in the South-south and Imo in the South-east.

But INEC, on Tuesday, asked the public to disregard the information about alleged tampering of results uploaded to IReV, describing it as a “misleading report and misinformation”.

This is contained in a statement by its National Commissioner and member of its Information and Voter Education, Mohammed Haruna.

Mr Haruna said: “The Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) attention has been drawn to some media reports alleging that the Commission was tampering with the accredited figures of voters in the Kogi Governorship Election results uploaded on the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal. However, these reports are unfounded.

“For the avoidance of doubt, the most accurate and up-to-date Voters’ Accreditation Data is available in the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), which is used for the authentication and accreditation of registered voters at various polling units on election day. It automatically retains the accreditation data of all voters.”

Mr Haruna explained that the BVAS machine is designed to work primarily offline while it uploads accreditation data to the Accreditation Backend System (ABS) gradually depending on network availability.

He said this upload does not happen when the device’s application is inactive or when the internet connectivity is poor.

“The same experience applies to a situation where more than one BVAS gadget is used at a polling unit with more than 1,250 registered voters. This could be compared to a situation when poor network services delay the delivery of an SMS sent from one individual to another through a mobile phone,” he said.

He said at the end of voting, Presiding Officers are expected to press the data exportation button on the BVAS to ensure that all the accreditation data are exported to the ABS.

“This process, referred to as synchronisation and which is ongoing, could lead to changes in the accreditation figures as more data flows in to update the existing figures. This is the basis for the caveat provided on the IReV portal, regarding the accreditation figures. The accreditation data cannot be changed on the BVAS after the close of the poll,” he said.

But apart from the alleged tampering with IReV data, there were other rampant allegations that results from polling units where elections did not hold in Imo State, had emerged on IReV.

Yiaga Africa, an election transparency group, had on Sunday demanded INEC’s explanation on the issue.

But INEC did not address the issue in its statement on Tuesday.

IReV is an online platform where photographic pictures of polling unit results are meant to be uploaded using the Bimodal Voter Accrediation System (BVAS) machines as soon as voting and collation end at the various voting units.

IReV controversies, legal standing

INEC had promised ahead of the last general elections in February that the results of the polls would be uploaded to IReV promptly.

But it failed to fulfill the promise with results ending up taking from days to weeks to be uploaded to IReV for the public to access. The commission blamed the delay on unforseen glitches in the system.

INEC’s failure to upload polling unit results to IReV promptly as promised became a touchy issue that negatively impacted the review of the 25 February presidential election.

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It formed part of the issues opposition candidates raised in their petitions challenging the election of President Bola Tinubu.

But the Presidential Election Petition Court, in September, dismissed the opposition candidates’ arguments about IReV.

The court insisted that IReV had no place in the legal process of counting and collation of results, adding that it was not a result collation platform as suggested by the petitioners.

Displeased, the opposition candidates raised the issue in their appeals at the Supreme Court challenging the verdict of the presidential election court.

The Supreme Court upheld the judgement of the presidential election court by dismissing the appeals by the opposition candidates – Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democractic Party and Peter Obi of the Labour Party.

“The court below (presidential election court) held that IReV portal is not a collation system,” adding that the manual polling units results would suffice in dealing with manual collation of results.

The court held that the non-transmission of polling units results in real-time did not substantially affect the outcome of the election.

Although the seven-member panel of the court held that the IReV glitches did not impede result collation, it admitted that impacted negatively on public perception of the disputed presidential election.

“Truth must be told, the non-functioning of the IReV may have also reduced the confidence of the voting public in the electoral process,” Inyang Okoro, the presiding justice, who read the court’s lead decision, said.

Qosim Suleiman is a reporter at Premium Times in partnership with Report for the World, which matches local newsrooms with talented emerging journalists to report on under-covered issues around the globe