The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said it would not be fair to write off the performance of the Commission in the 2023 general elections because of the hiccups experienced in the upload of the February 25 presidential election online.
INEC National Commissioner Festus Okoye stated this on Tuesday while responding to the final report on the 2023 general elections submitted by the European Union Election Observation Mission on Monday.
He urged Nigerians not to judge the electoral umpire as a result of the challenge the commission experienced in uploading the presidential election.
“It is not fair to judge the entire performance of the commission based on a glitch in the result upload for the presidential election,” he said.
Mr. Okoye, in defense of the commission, argued that the law has empowered political parties to know what goes on at the polling units.
“Almost all the political parties nominated and 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 center.” So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result uploads to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court,” he added.
The Chairman of INEC’s Information and Voter Education Committee further explained that Nigerians commended the electoral body for the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) in the general elections.
On voters’ accreditation, Okoye insisted that nobody has faulted the functionality of the BVAS.
The BVAS machine
was introduced by INEC for the conduct of the 2023 general elections and was designed to upload photographic copies of result sheets to the IREV after result documentation across the 176,000 polling units of the country.
However, many observers were dismayed that INEC could not collate the results of the presidential election electronically but manually, owing to what they described as a technical glitch on their server, which is one of the major contentious issues challenged by the PDP and LP at the ongoing tribunal.
