₦airaland Forum

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has shed light on the technical glitch that prevented the upload of presidential election results on the INEC Result Viewing (IREV) portal during the 2023 general elections.

According to INEC, the issue was caused by an unanticipated system error that occurred while mapping presidential election results to participating polling units.

The commission said this error led to internal server errors, which prevented the upload of results.

The INEC explanation is contained in the report from the commission’s stakeholder engagements and retreats held between July 11 and August 5, 2023, to review the conduct of the general elections.

Participants in these engagements included leaders of registered political parties, civil society organizations, Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs), Administrative Secretaries, security agencies under the Inter-agency Consultative Committee on Election Security, and media executives.

Copies of the report have been made available to the Senate and House of Representatives Committee on Electoral Matters.

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.”

The report added, “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.”

The report also revealed that “in the process of resolving the challenge, it was discovered that the backend system of the IReV was able to query and detect the base States for uploading the PU result sheets 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.

“In configuring and mapping the election results for the presidential and National Assembly elections, the commission created 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 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.

“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.

“Having identified and established the source of the problem, the commission quickly created and deployed “Hotfixes” which are software updates for fixing a bug or any vulnerability in a system. The deployed hotfixes eventually resolved the HTTP error on the system and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8.55pm on the 25th February 2023.

“After the problem with the upload was resolved, the Commission noticed a high volume of uploads on the queue. All results that were scanned but could not be uploaded due to the error were queued waiting to be automatically processed.

“Due to the large volume and high traffic from the queue, the system was running slower, even though it tried to scale up automatically to handle the unanticipated heavy traffic.

“While the density of the traffic that slowed the upload was one issue, the requirement that the BVAS devices to be switched on and connected to the internet for the upload of results in the offline queue was another.

“However, some of the POs had at the time left their PUs, and the devices had either been switched-off, or were out of internet coverage. Switched off devices could not connect and upload the results sheets.

“It would be recalled that on 4th February 2023, about three weeks to the General Election, the commission conducted a mock exercise to test the transmission of election results from PUs to the IReV. This was a general test that was not specific to any given election.

“Perhaps had this mock exercise been tailored to specific elections, the hitch that was experienced in uploading Presidential election results would have been detected on time.

“Consequently, a major lesson for the Commission is that in addition to other technical and administrative preconditions, time is critical to the deployment of election technology. Adequate time to develop, test, embed and publicise the technology is essential to its success”.

On the management of election results, the report said: “The scanning of the Polling Unit results for display on the IReV drastically curtailed opportunities to manipulate results between the PUs and the collation centres. This is because the public already had records of the results before collation.

“Furthermore, the use of the Collation Support and Result Verification System (CSRVS), which supports and expedites collation, making for the improved management of election results.”

https://latestnewsng.com/2025/01/inec-opens-up-on-why-the-upload-of-2023-presidential-election-results-failed/

Story story story!
Naija my country

Hmm...

This explanation sounds plausible. Hopefully lessons have been learnt and we don't have a repeat.

You sha want the POnus to start the new week gritting teeth

Magana banza kowai! You can tell that to HELL-LIE-ANUS, MannaLIZARD, Mad-RIGGER, YariMOLO and their good for nothing comrades.

[Yakubu is a criminal he will vomit the money apc gave him soon.

Tinubu will come for you very hard, you want to hand power back to your fulani brother before you retire.

We know why it "failed". Nothing wey you go tell us now!

Just imagine night time story

Story!
You guys are not ready to tell Nigerians the truth.
I served as an advocate staff,RO of my unit faa. You guys deliberately disable that presidential pageway. Eni kure

Idiots

Death after burial. It was deliberate. What have they done with the snatched power? Suffering, hardship and T-pain.

And you still have a conclusive result to announce @ 4am even with the incongruent results on the IREV portal? Same election that recorded 100 success for the senatorial and HOR elections? That technical glitch just for electoral criminality will continue to hunt you. Useless man.

aswani:
This explanation sounds plausible. Hopefully lessons have been learnt and we don't have a repeat.

Which lessons? Last elections few weeks ago results uploaded from the pooling unit which is the most accurate of them all was different from the results manually collated at the collection centers which was what was inherent in the last presidential elections. What changed? Nothing

aswani:
This explanation sounds plausible. Hopefully lessons have been learnt and we don't have a repeat.

Which lessons? Last elections few weeks ago results uploaded from the pooling unit which is the most accurate of them all was different from the results manually collated at the collection centers which was what was inherent in the last presidential elections. What changed? Nothing ..

idahme:
Which lessons? Last elections few weeks ago results uploaded from the pooling unit which is the most accurate of them all was different from the results manually collated at the collection centers which was what was inherent in the last presidential elections. What changed? Nothing ..

I believe the situation with Presidential elections wasn't different results, remember an Obidient Marc Essien redid it and President Tinubu still won, the issue was blurred forms being uploaded by Polling officers.

aswani:
I believe the situation with Presidential elections wasn't different results, remember an Obidient Marc Essien redid it and President Tinubu still won, the issue was blurred forms being uploaded by Polling officers.

I don't believe i fact checked, the results are in the public domain. I fact checked the results of where i voted my LGA in Port Harcourt, the is a complete mess different from the results manually announced if you think otherwise do a fact check to confirm no jokes. I don't need to do other states if the results of the place i voted didn't reflect on the results manually.

We haven't changed a bit, go and fact check the edo elections you will be shocked to see same. The worst thing is that the elections petition panel made a ruling giving legitimacy to the manual results and the Irev results was just an academic exercise with no effect.

idahme:
I don't believe i fact checked, the results are in the public domain. I fact checked the results of where i voted my LGA in Port Harcourt, the is a complete mess different from the results manually announced if you think otherwise do a fact check to confirm no jokes. I don't need to do other states if the results of the place i voted didn't reflect on the results manually.

We haven't changed a bit, go and fact check the edo elections you will be shocked to see same. The worst thing is that the elections petition panel made a ruling giving legitimacy to the manual results and the Irev results was just an academic exercise with no effect.

That is because the manual results has the signatures of party agents who must have agreed.

Softmirror:
That is because the manual results has the signatures of party agents who must have agreed.

When that result was first signed and uploaded on irev in the presence of party agents how come is the one announced different ? The court would have made it possible by making a pronouncement that results manually collated must be same with the one uploaded. If the ruling was like this no politician would change result already forwarded to IREV, they would all go and campaign in order to win votes. All the rigging is done in tge collation centers and not on the polling units where both the voters and agents all watch to ensure the right things are done.

We have a long way to go, the judges failed to make rigging harder.

idahme:
I don't believe i fact checked, the results are in the public domain. I fact checked the results of where i voted my LGA in Port Harcourt, the is a complete mess different from the results manually announced if you think otherwise do a fact check to confirm no jokes. I don't need to do other states if the results of the place i voted didn't reflect on the results manually.

We haven't changed a bit, go and fact check the edo elections you will be shocked to see same. The worst thing is that the elections petition panel made a ruling giving legitimacy to the manual results and the Irev results was just an academic exercise with no effect.

Are you able to post the differing results from Rivers state?

Useless Story & hopeless motivational speech for miscreants

Yakubu will meet his waterloo soonest for enjoying the people’s sufferings.

bhella10:
You sha want the POnus to start the new week gritting teeth

what ist with the number they gave you demon possessed asslickes.like you are demon possessed asshole number 10

Yakubu has already attracted curses to himself, and this will trickle down to the 4th generation. After the fifth generation, if they rise up and seek forgiveness, then the curse may be blotted away.

These Criminals and their shenanigans.

aswani:
Are you able to post the differing results from Rivers state?

I know where you are heading to, it isn't where you can bring in percentage error that is permissible. It was an eyesore, if its +-0.5% to +-5% i won't be saying this

idahme:
I know where you are heading to, it isn't where you can bring in percentage error that is permissible. It was an eyesore, if its +-0.5% to +-5% i won't be saying this

The truth is I wasn't heading there, I just wanted to see proof of different figures as alleged.

Even if it was off by one vote, it is wrong.

aswani:
The truth is I wasn't heading there, I just wanted to see proof of different figures as alleged.

Even if it was off by one vote, it is wrong.

This is the summary of BBC report as regards the election i took part in and saw evidence for myself on the IREV portal vs declared manual results


https://www.bbc.com/news/65163713


It was really pathetic.

idahme:
This is the summary of BBC report as regards the election i took part in and saw evidence for myself on the IREV portal vs declared manual results


https://www.bbc.com/news/65163713


It was really pathetic.

How did this not end up being brought up during the court proceedings by Peter Obi's lawyers?

There was no error. They knew those ibodients already planned how to hack the system and input fake results that'd show bitter obi won. They just outsmarted the dunces. That's one reason ibodients will never forgive INEC.

aswani:
How did this not end up being brought up during the court proceedings by Peter Obi's lawyers?

Bro it was an organized crime involving the judiciary and the executive, i followed the election petition panel so keenly but the judges said the IREV isn't recorded by law that whatever they see on the manual results stands.

It only required the judges to rule that the manual results must be in tandem with the IREV results posted from the pooling unit(which is the most credible amongst all results) in the presence of voters, agents and INEC officials to make our system a bit proof against election rigging but they failed. Really bad

idahme:
Bro it was an organized crime involving the judiciary and the executive, i followed the election petition panel so keenly but the judges said the IREV isn't recorded by law that whatever they see on the manual results stands.

It only required the judges to rule that the manual results must be in tandem with the IREV results posted from the pooling unit(which is the most credible amongst all results) in the presence of voters, agents and INEC officials to make our system a bit proof against election rigging but they failed. Really bad

Did the LP polling unit guys not sign the correct forms and take pictures of what the signed as opposed to what had their forged signatures?

Why were the discrepancies in the forms nor splashed all over social media? Why were this not used as evidence even if dismissed?