The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has officially addressed the failure of its result viewing portal (IReV) to upload the presidential results from the February 23, 2023 election. The explanation comes as part of the commission’s 526-page report on the 2023 general elections released ahead of its first anniversary.
Despite the seamless working of the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS), it took weeks for the presidential results to be uploaded to the IReV, sparking protests from opposition parties and their supporters. Media and civil society organizations analyzed the eventually posted results, noting discrepancies such as inflated votes for APC candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu in Rivers State and reduced votes for Labour Party candidate Peter Obi.
Tinubu was credited with 231,591 votes while Obi had 175,071 votes in the official results, but the IReV results appeared to show Obi winning Rivers with about 100,000 votes. However, this wasn’t significant enough to change the national gap between him and Tinubu or the PDP candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who came second.
INEC has maintained that the results reflected voters’ sentiments and denied accusations of bias and manipulation. The report acknowledged the challenge of uploading presidential election results to the IReV, attributing it to internal server errors during the troubleshooting process.
