March 18 Elections: INEC Has Learnt From Errors Of February 25 Elections – Okoye

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) claims that they have learned several important lessons from February 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections.

Naija News recalls that after the presidential and National Assembly elections, opposition parties claimed that INEC employees at the polling units were unable to electronically transmit election results to the Result Viewing Portal (IReV) as planned.

The manual counting of results and the announcement of the elections’ winners were also criticized by the parties.

The governorship and state assembly elections were later moved from March 11 to March 18 to allow for the BVAS machine reconfiguration after getting court permission.

In an interview on Channels Television on Monday, Festus Okoye, the national commissioner for INEC, said the commission is making extensive efforts to address problems with IReV before the elections on March 18.

In addition, Okoye declared that “valuable lessons” would be applied to the upcoming weekend’s elections for the state assembly and governorship elections.

Okoye claims that the IT division of the commission now knows what to do if there are issues with the uploading of polling unit results for the March 18 elections on the IReV portal.

According to Okoye, the results of more than 170,000 polling units from the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25 have been uploaded to the platform.

He added that the reconfiguration of the BVAS would be completed on Tuesday in time for the March 18 elections.

“I’m sure that by Tuesday when we hope to complete the resettling of the BVAS for the governorship and state assembly elections, the results in all the places where elections were conducted would have been pushed to the accreditation backend,” he said.