Why INEC Couldn’t Transmit Presidential Election Results – Source

A top official of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has come out to reveal the real reason why the commission could not upload the results of the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections on its portal.

Naija News gathered that the source who pleaded anonymity told The Punch that the commission’s inability to upload results on election day was due to a code error that originated from the server application.

According to the source, it was the code error that frustrated INEC’s plan to upload the result on election day.

He explained that the code error originated within the application itself and hindered the upload of results and all efforts to address the code issue by INEC’s team of Information Technology experts failed.

The source said “The technical glitch that hampered the transmission of the presidential result was a code error that kept crashing the server, which kept prompting an HTTP 500 error. This sort of error originated from within the application.”

Naija News recalls that the commission faced a lot of criticism following its failure to upload results from the presidential and national assembly elections.

This online news platform however gathered that as of Saturday, which makes it two weeks after the election, the commission has uploaded 168,711 out of the 176,846 polling units on its portal, a figure that represents 95 % of the results uploaded.

Recall that INEC uploaded 41,649 polling results or less than 30 percent of the results to its viewing portal a day after the election.

However, the source stated that the commission has addressed the code error technical issue and also put in place a backup system ahead of the governorship polls on March 18.

He added that the commission had also dispatched its tech teams to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) ahead of the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections, following the order of the Appeal Court to reconfigure the over 176,000 BVAS machines that will be used for the March 18 polls.

An official of the commission disclosed that “INEC has commenced the reconfiguration of the BVAS nationwide. The RATechs (Registration Area Technical Support) deployed to support the BVAS during the February 25 election are the ones reconfiguring the devices.

“INEC has sufficient skilled staff members to handle the reconfiguration. Yes, the technical issue has been resolved and there is a backup plan in place to forestall reoccurrence.”