The National Chairman of INEC, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, promised so much about delivering the best election to Nigerians with the use of technology.
Rather than receive accolades for keeping his promise, some are of the view that what they ordered was not what Yakubu delivered, as the real-time, upload of results from polling units which Yakubu promised turned out to be a ruse.
INEC chairman at Chatham House
This informed the early choice of a new voter accreditation technology using an electronic device called the Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System. We have tested it in several bye-elections and off-cycle governorship elections.
In addition, the decision to make polling units’ election results available for public viewing, which has always been a major demand of citizens and election observers, falls into this early choice of election technology. The INEC results viewing portal, the IREV, is a dedicated web portal for the public view of polling units’ results as soon as finalised on election day.
This has been employed in several elections conducted by the commission in the past few years in particular the uploading of polling unit results to the IREV portal has been deployed in 105 constituencies where the commission conducted off-season elections since August 2020. The result can still be viewed on the portal, making the IREV an invaluable repository of election results in Nigeria. It is an archive for election results.
Citizens and anybody who registered on the portal can still view the results. I kept asking those who care to approach the commission that what we have been doing is to upload the scanned images of the results and the same hard copies are given to party agents at polling units on election day I have consistently asked candidates and politicians to compare the results on IREV portal with the hard copies brought by their polling agents if there were discrepancies. It’s 99.9 per cent accurate and the results are still there.
November 22, 2022
In apparent response to an exclusive story published by Vanguard, to help the Commission, Professor Yakubu said:
On this note, let me seize this opportunity to respond to a story emanating from a section of the media that the commission has decided to jettison the uploading of polling unit results in real time on Election Day. It should be disregarded as fake news. The commission will upload polling unit-level results and citizens will have access to these results in real-time as they upload from polling units. This innovation was introduced by the commission and that commission cannot turn around and undermine itself.
This technology has come to stay, we will upload polling unit results and citizens will have the right to view these results. After all, we are serving the citizens. How can we deny citizens access to the results of the process conducted by them at the polling unit? I want to reassure you that the 2023 election is going to be the best and we are committed to ensuring that votes cast by Nigerians will determine the outcome of elections, nothing more, nothing less