It’s unfair to evaluate us based on glitch in uploading result of presidential poll — INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) stated on Tuesday that it would be unfair to evaluate it based on the upload error that occurred during the presidential election on February 25 and that it does not represent all polls.

Festus Okoye, the national commissioner for INEC, made this comment in reaction to the final report on the general elections of 2023 that the European Union Election Observation Mission presented on Monday.

“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,” Okoye revealed through a statement.

Okoye claimed that despite the difficulties encountered, many Nigerians applauded the electoral authority for using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) during the general elections.

He added that the law now gives political parties the right to be aware of what occurs at the polling places.

Read Also: Atiku’s witness alleges INEC deleted results on 110 BVAS machines in FCT

“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 go to the collation centre. So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result uploads in order to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court,” he added.

Voting ended in most of the over 176,000 polling units where the election held across Nigeria on 25 February, but results remained inaccessible on the INEC IReV portal 24 hours after polling ended.

Peter Obi of the Labour Party had filed his petition at the presidential election court to challenge the victory of President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), citing failure to upload the results of the election to IReV as one the breaches that marred the disputed poll.

He also alleged that INEC manipulated the polls in favour of Tinubu.

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