The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that the technical issue that prevented the 2023 presidential election results from being uploaded to its Result Viewing Portal (IReV) should not be used to assess the outcome of the election as a whole.
This is in light of the electoral body’s denial of wasting government funds as a result of the failure to instantly upload results.
The remark was made on Thursday by Festus Okoye, the INEC spokesman, who discussed the technical difficulties that marred the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25.
He clarified that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), aside from for the presidential election, was successfully employed for voter accreditation and result upload for the polls in the other elections.
“We are only talking about result upload for the presidential election only. It is not true or correct to insinuate even remotely that taxpayers’ money was wasted, and the machine did not work,” Okoye said.
“It is not fair to judge the entire performance of the commission on the basis of a glitch in the result upload for the presidential election,” he said.
“Almost all the political parties nominated and got accredited at least over 170,000 polling agents. What that means is that they had primary evidence of the results from the polling units.
“It is those results from the polling units, together with the BVAS as a machine itself that goes to the collation centre. So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result upload in order to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court,” he added.