…Explains Failure of IReV

To demonstrate its sensitivity to persons with disabilities, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Friday reported that 15,771 magnifying glasses were deployed out of a total of 16,071 that were required in Polling Units (PUs) across the country in the 2023 general elections.

The electoral body in a 526-page 2023 General Elections Report published on its website also said 5,958 Braille ballot guides were deployed to polling units where they were needed.

The 2023 General Election incorporated various inclusivity measures to ensure the participation and representation of all eligible citizens stressing that inclusivity measures by the Commission are wide-ranging and began far back in 2012 with its gender policy.

According to the electoral body in the report, specific measures were taken to ensure that prison inmates who were eligible to vote exercised their voting rights in the 2023 general elections adding that:” by enabling inmates to participate in the electoral process, this measure aimed to uphold democratic principles and promote civic engagement among incarcerated
individuals”.

The Commission said it developed, deployed, and piloted two On-line resources/platforms for the 2023 General Election training: – the INEC Training Bot and the INEC e-School.

According to the report, the INEC Training Bot (INEC-TBOT) for the 2023 General Electon training was hosted on Telegram and the INEC official Facebook page to address the training needs of SPOs, POs, APOs, ROs and COs on their roles and responsibilities in the election.

The report said the INEC -TBOT is accessible to registered trainees 24/7 to answer queries and requests.

INEC T-Bot according to the report was deployed and utilised for both physical and on-line training of Ad hoc staff. The Bot facilitates self-learning by committed staff of the Commission and subsequently public users.

The Challenge with IReV
The report also provided a detailed explanation as to why Nigerians couldn’t view in real-time the result of the presidential elections on the INEC Results Viewing (IReV) during the 25 February presidential elections that was held last year.

The electoral body concurred that a key challenge that impacted on the 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 Saturday 25 February 2023.

“To begin with, it is important to note that the IReV portal is one of the most significant innovations introduced by the Commission prior to the 2023 General Election to promote the integrity and transparency of the electoral process. As a public-facing website, the IReV portal shows the images of the original Polling Unit result sheets as recorded in Form EC8A”.

“The operational methodology and the concept behind the upload of results to the IReV for public viewing is quite simple. At the end of polls, Polling Unit results (Form EC8As) are scanned and uploaded to the IReV by the Presiding Officer(s). These results are then available for viewing to the public and all stakeholders,”INEC said.

The iReV, which was first used by INEC during the Nasarawa central constituency bye-election in August 2020, was designed for the uploading of result sheets from polling units on election day so that the public could view them in real-time.

This, according to the commission, is to promote transparency — a development that also allows members of the public to tally the scores themselves while awaiting the official results.

However, while most of the results of the legislative elections held on February 25, 2023 were uploaded to iReV, those of the presidential poll held the same day were not on the portal until late at night and only a few were available.

It took nearly a week for a substantial number of the presidential election result sheets from the 176,849 polling units to be uploaded, by which time opposition figures had started alleging manipulation of the votes.

The commission, in the report , said the server returned “HTTP error” because of a configuration bug which was discovered after the presiding officers at the polling units could only upload the results of the national assembly elections.

“In configuring and mapping the election results for the presidential and NASS elections,” the report reads: “the Commission created Four Hundred and Seventy (470) election types consisting 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. However, the presidential election result is a single, countrywide constituency and therefore, does not belong to any one State.

“Consequently, while the uploads for the NASS elections succeeded as the application was able to identify the respective State and build the folder hierarchy for the results organization process for the election, attempts to upload the presidential election results sheets, which does not belong to or mapped to any State on the database, failed.

“Instead, it returned a HTTP server error response. This failure is attributable to the inability of the application to create and build a folder structure to organize the uploaded images of the result sheets of the presidential election.”

“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,” parts of the report reads.

When the commission could not deliver on its promise for the presidential elections, Nigerians on social media lashed at the commission and accused it of deliberate attempt to subvert the elections.

It became a major dent on INEC’s credibility in the 2023 presidential election that was challenged by the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and the Labour Party (LP) candidate,Mr. Peter Obi, who came second and third, respectively.

Both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court in their judgements in the suits filed by Alhaji Abubakar and Mr. Obi challenging the victory of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC noted that the malfunctioning of IReV during the presidential election reduced public confidence in the electoral process.

Justice Inyang Okoro of the Supreme Court in the Court’s lead judgement said :”Truth must be told, the non-functioning of the IReV may have also reduced the confidence of the voting public in the electoral process”.

According to the report, 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.

The commission in the report said it 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.

Afterwards, the Commission said it engaged with its field officers for the details of the error in order to trace the origin, source, scale and magnitude.

The report said during the troubleshooting process, the commission 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.”

“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 Polling Units,” the report stated.

The commission stated that in configuring and mapping the election results for the presidential and National Assembly elections, it created 470 election types consisting of one presidential constituency covering the entire country, 109 Senatorial Districts and 360 federal constituencies.

It said during result sheets upload, the backend system of the IReV was able to query and detect the base states for uploading the result sheets stressing that :“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.”

The report said: “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 as the application was able to identify the respective state and build the folder hierarchy for the results organisation process for the election, attempts to upload the presidential election results sheets, which does not belong to or mapped to any state on the database, failed,” the report stated.

“Instead, it returned a HTTP server error response. This failure is attributable 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.”

INEC added that it immediately put in place several strict security and audit control measures to prevent any unfettered or elevated access to the Result Upload System due to the complex, sensitive and critical nature of the systems and the real potential for malicious cyber attacks.

INEC said it, therefore, created and deployed “Hotfixes” to resolve the HTTP error on the system stressing:“and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8.55pm on the 25th of February 2023.”

In addition, the commission stated that the high volume of uploads already queued up at the backend also resulted in the system running slower.

The report said another issue was that the offline queue requires the BVAS devices to be switched-on and connected to the internet for the upload.

It , however , noted that because some of the presiding officers have left their polling units and have switched off the devices, it couldn’t be uploaded automatically . The Commission had to reach out to the POs of affected areas to switch on their systems and ensure internet connectivity for the uploads to continue. This accounted for the delay, with some of the results coming in the next day,” it said.

The commission according to the report said it has made improvements on the IReV adding that it has taken additional steps to build more resilience and undertaken additional checks to ensure the stability and optimal operation and performance of the IReV portal.

It said 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.

INEC in the report maintained that the glitch experienced did not affect the outcome or credibility of the election.

It said 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,” the report stated.