By Kamil Opeyemi
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) insists that the 2023 general elections was fair and credible.
According to the election umpire, the technical glitch that caused the failure of the result upload on its viewing portal did not affect the credibility of the election.
Recall that 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 debunking the insinuations in the official report of the 2023 elections released on Friday, INEC acknowledged the glitch.
It, however, maintained that the credibility of the polls was not affected.
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.
“As voting ended across the country and POs
began the process of uploading the images
of the PU result sheets of the elections for the various constituencies around 4:00pm, the Commission began to receive reports that attempts to upload presidental
electon result sheets was failing,” the report partly reads
Furthermore, INEC said due to the complex, sensitive and critical nature of the systems and the real potential
for malicious cyberattacks, the Commission immediately put in place several strict security and audit control measures to prevent any unfettered or elevated access to the Result Upload System.
“In the process of resolving the challenge, it was discovered that the backend system of the IReV was
able to query and detect the base States for uploading the PU result sheets based on the mapping of all Senatorial District and Federal Constituency elections to the respective 36 States of the Federation and the FCT as established in the database structure deployed within the system.
“Following these reports, the Commission immediately
engaged with its feld officials for details in order to understand, and trace the origin, source, scale and magnitude of the problem across the result management ecosystem to devise appropriate solutions.
“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 further said
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.”
“This failure is attributable to the inability of the application to create and build a folder structure to organize the uploaded images of the result sheets of the presidential election.”
According to INEC, having identified and established the source of the problem, the Commission quickly created and deployed “Hotfixes” which are software updates for fixing a bug or any vulnerabilities in a system.
“The deployed hotfixes eventually resolved
the HTTP error on the system and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8.55pm on the 25th of February 2023.