The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has stated that there will be no difficulties in the upload of results for the Bayelsa, Imo, and Kogi elections on the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
In a live interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Friday, INEC Chief Press Secretary Rotimi Oyekanmi stated this.
“We have been using the IReV for all governorship elections, but it [2023] was the first time we deployed it for the general election setting. Well, we had a glitch for some hours, and we fixed it. But I can assure you that this time around we are not going to have glitches,” he said.
INEC blamed technical difficulties for the upload procedure becoming a big concern in the 2023 elections.
The chief press secretary, however, said the problems have been fixed.
“I can affirm that those technical issues have been resolved. Last week, we undertook the mock accreditation, and one of the reasons we did that was to test run these technology gadgets we were going to use, and it was successful,” he said.
Oyekanmi stated that any startup can have problems and that major players like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter occasionally have downtime as well.
“Technology can throw up challenges, but by and large, we have learned our lessons from the 2023 general elections,” he said
While many Nigerians have expressed worries about the results transmission process, he clarified that INEC is uploading rather than transmitting results via IReV.
“We are not transmitting; we are uploading,” he said, noting that there are differences between transmitting and uploading.
“All we are doing is that we are taking a picture of the polling unit results and uploading same to the portal,” Oyekanmi maintained.