THE Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) stated today that the country’s February 25 presidential election should not be considered invalid as a result of the uploading glitch that occurred.
Festus Okoye, National Commissioner for INEC, made this statement in reaction to the final report on the general elections for 2023 that the European Union Election Observation Mission filed yesterday.
He pleaded with Nigerians not to criticize the electoral system because of difficulties the panel ran into during the upload of the presidential election.
“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.
According to Okoye, the law has empowered political parties to know what goes on at the polling units.
“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.
According to the chairman of INEC’s Information and Voter Education Committee, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was implemented in the general elections, and Nigerians applauded the electoral body for doing so.
No one, according to Okoye, has criticized the BVAS’s functionality in terms of voter accreditation.
INEC had supplied the BVAS machine to around 176,000 polling places nationwide, for the purpose of registering voters for the general elections in 2023.
After results documentation at the polling places, the gadget was also made to swiftly upload photographic copies of result sheets to the INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal.
