According to Festus Okoye, a National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), over 170,000 polling unit results from the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections have been uploaded onto the Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
The Commission plans to complete the reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) by Tuesday in preparation for the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections. Okoye noted that the BVAS used for the presidential and National Assembly elections that do not push to the accreditation backend will not be reconfigured, and the data relating to these elections will not be included.
Okoye stressed that every Nigerian has the constitutional and legal right to protest, but political parties will not be allowed to access the BVAS or the biometrics of voters. INEC is the regulator of political parties, and it will not neglect its core responsibility to aggrieved political parties.
The INEC commissioner blamed political parties for making polling units “inaccessible” for voters, resulting in low turnout at the last polls. He noted that INEC learned some “valuable lessons” during the presidential and National Assembly elections, which would be used in the governorship and state assembly polls. The ICT department of the commission is making serious efforts to rectify challenges with the IReV portal ahead of the March 18 polls.
Okoye stated that the Electoral Act 2022 allows every registered political party in conjunction with their candidates to send agents to every polling unit in Nigeria. The commission deployed to 176,666 polling units, but political parties deployed more agents to the polling units than the number of polling units that opened. Each political party got a copy of Form EC 8, the polling unit result sheet, which is uploaded into the IReV portal.
