The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on Tuesday, said the glitch experienced in the upload of the February 25 presidential election in the country should not write off the entire polls held nationwide.
INEC National Commissioner, Festus Okoye stated this in response to the final report on the 2023 general elections submitted by the European Union Election Observation Mission on Monday.
He urged Nigerians not to judge the electoral empire as a result of the challenge the commission experienced in 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.
The Chairman of INEC’s Information and Voter Education Committee explained that Nigerians commended the electoral body for the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) in the general elections.
In terms of voter accreditation, Okoye maintained that nobody has faulted the functionality of the BVAS.
The BVAS machine is an electronic device distributed across the over 176,000 polling units in the country by INEC for the accreditation of voters during the 2023 general elections.
The device was also designed to promptly upload photographic copies of result sheets to the INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal after result documentation at the polling units.
Uploading results was a major aspect that the credibility of the whole process lies. To do otherwise was massive failure of the process and the entire process lost credibility completely.