The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of Nigeria has provided a detailed explanation for the inability of Nigerians to view the results of the presidential elections in real-time on the INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal during the elections held on 25 February last year.
The explanation was provided in INEC's 526-page 2023 General Elections Report, which was published on its website on Friday. In the post-election report, INEC acknowledged that a significant challenge that impacted public perception of the election and elicited widespread commentary was the failure to upload polling unit results of the presidential election to IReV in real-time at the close of polls on 25 February 2023.
The report reads, “By and large, the glitch experienced in uploading the scanned images of polling unit presidential election result sheets on 25th February 2023 was due to the inherent complexity within the system, which was difficult to anticipate and mitigate."
Before the elections, INEC had repeatedly promised Nigerians that it would upload the election results to the IReV portal in real-time. While INEC was able to upload the results of the National Assembly elections held on the same day onto IReV, the results of the presidential elections were not uploaded until hours later.
When the commission could not deliver on its promise for the presidential elections, Nigerians on social media lashed out at the commission and accused it of a deliberate attempt to subvert the elections. This development significantly dented INEC’s credibility in last year’s presidential election, which was challenged by the candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, and the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, who came second and third, respectively.
While delivering judgement on the suits filed by Messrs Abubakar and Obi, challenging the election of Bola Tinubu of the APC, whom INEC declared the winner of the disputed election, the Supreme Court noted that the malfunctioning of IReV during the presidential election reduced public confidence in the electoral process.
In a section of the report detailing the challenge with IReV on 25 February, INEC said the challenge was unique to the presidential election and was due to an unforeseen technical challenge arising from the uniqueness of the presidential election. According to the INEC report, the commission started receiving complaints from Presiding Officers at polling units at about 4 p.m. when voting ended that attempts to upload the result sheets of the presidential elections were failing.
During the troubleshooting process, the commission said it established that the errors being received by presiding officers originated from within an application due to problems “relating to configuration, permissions, or failure to create or access application resources correctly."
INEC further explained that the Election Result Modules encountered an unexpected configuration problem in mapping the presidential election results uploaded into the system to the participating Polling Units.
In configuring and mapping the election results for the presidential and National Assembly elections, INEC created 470 election types. These consisted of one presidential constituency covering the entire country, 109 Senatorial Districts, and 360 federal constituencies. Each Senatorial District and Federal Constituency election on the database was mapped to their respective States.
During the result sheets upload, the backend system of the IReV was able to query and detect the base states for uploading the result sheets. This was 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.
However, since the presidential election result is a single, countrywide constituency and does not belong to any one state, it created an error. While the uploads for the National Assembly elections succeeded, attempts to upload the presidential election results sheets failed. This failure was attributed to the inability of the application to create and build a folder structure to organise the uploaded images of the result sheets of the presidential election.
In response to this, INEC immediately put in place several strict security and audit control measures to prevent any unfettered or elevated access to the Result Upload System. The commission created and deployed "Hotfixes" to resolve 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.
The commission also noted that the high volume of uploads already queued up at the backend resulted in the system running slower. Another issue was that the offline queue requires the BVAS devices to be switched-on and connected to the internet for the upload. However, some of the presiding officers had left their polling units and switched off the devices, preventing automatic upload. INEC had to reach out to the POs of affected areas to switch on their systems and ensure internet connectivity for the uploads to continue.
Despite these challenges, INEC has made improvements on the IReV, taken additional steps to build more resilience, and undertaken 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 entire result upload ecosystem before the conduct of any election.
Finally, INEC maintained that the glitch experienced did not affect the outcome or credibility of the election. It stated that political party agents and security personnel were given copies of the polling unit results after they were announced in public and displayed at polling units for scrutiny by voters. Therefore, when they were eventually uploaded, it was easy to compare them with the copies displayed at polling units and given to the party agents and party officials.