The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has explained that the technical issue encountered during the uploading of scanned images of Polling Unit (PU) result sheets in the presidential election on February 25, 2023, stemmed from the inherent complexity of the system, which was challenging to predict and mitigate.
INEC clarified that while the upload of National Assembly election results was successful because the application recognized the respective states and organized the results accordingly, attempts to upload presidential election result sheets failed as they were not associated with any specific state in the database.
According to INEC’s 2023 Post-Election Report, the first presidential election result sheet was eventually uploaded successfully at 8:55 pm after efforts were made to rectify the error. The commission maintained that despite this glitch, the credibility of the election was not compromised, as copies of polling unit results were provided to political party agents and security personnel after being publicly announced.
The report detailed the technical intricacies of the problem, explaining that the system encountered difficulties in mapping the presidential election results to the appropriate polling units due to the unique nature of the presidential constituency, which encompasses the entire country and is not tied to any specific state.
To address the issue, INEC swiftly implemented software updates (Hotfixes) to resolve the HTTP error, facilitating the successful upload of the presidential election result sheets. However, the high volume of queued uploads and offline devices contributed to delays in processing some results, requiring coordination with polling officials to ensure connectivity and completion of uploads.
Despite these challenges, INEC emphasized that subsequent improvements were made to enhance the resilience and performance of the result upload system, including additional quality assurance checks and end-to-end testing before future elections.
The commission underscored that the diversity of outcomes in the 2023 General Election, with multiple parties securing executive and legislative positions across the country, reaffirmed the integrity of both the electoral process and the final results.
