The Independent National Electoral Commission has explained why the uploading of the 2023 presidential election results failed.
According to them, an unanticipated system error was responsible for the glitch that affected upload on the INEC Result Viewing (IREV).
The Commission said a review of the system during the upload process showed that the system was encountering an unexpected configuration problem in mapping the presidential election results uploaded into the system to the participating Polling Units.
The INEC explanation is contained in the report of the commission’s stakeholder engagements and retreats carried out by the commission between July 11 and August 5, 2023 to review the conduct of the general elections.
Those at in the stakeholders’ engagements include: leaders of the registered political parties, civil society organisations, Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) and Administrative Secretaries, security agencies under the Inter-agency Consultative Committee on Election Security and media executives.
The report said: “During this review, many stakeholders repeatedly sought explanation for the technical glitch that affected the upload of the 2023 Presidential election results. During the review, details of the problem were provided by INEC’s technical experts.
“In a nutshell, the challenge of uploading the PU presidential election results on the IReV after the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25 of 2023 was unique.”
Giving an insight into the problem which appeared to have cast some doubt on the credibility of the election, the report said: “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 4pm, the commission began to receive reports that the upload of presidential election result sheets was failing.
“Following these reports, the commission immediately engaged with its field officials for details to understand and trace the origin, source, scale and magnitude of the problem across the result management ecosystem to devise appropriate solutions.
“In the troubleshooting process, it was established that there was no issue in uploading the PU result sheets of the Senate and House of Representatives elections through the Election Result Modules. However, there was a problem with uploading the presidential election results to the system.
“Attempts to upload the results were generating internal server errors, which refer to a significant impairment that usually originate from within an application due to problems relating to configuration, permissions, or failure to create or access application resources correctly.
“Further interrogation of the Election Result Modules indicated that the system is encountering an unexpected configuration problem in mapping the presidential election results uploaded into the system to the participating PUs.
“Due to the complex, sensitive and critical nature of the systems and the real potential for malicious cyber-attacks, 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.”
