Off-Season Elections; INEC to avoid glitches in uploading Bayelsa, Imo, Kogi polls

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has declared that the uploading of results for the Bayelsa, Imo, and Kogi elections on the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) will be glitch-free. 

This is coming in the wake of the factthat the upload of results was a major issue in the 2023 general elections, which INEC attributed to technical difficulties.

INEC’s Chief Press Secretary, Rotimi Oyekanmi, made this known in an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Friday. 

His words: “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.

“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 also stated that there could be technology downtime at any point, but noted that the body has learned lessons from the conduct of the 2023 general elections.

“Technology can throw up challenges, but by and large, we have learned our lessons from the 2023 general elections.”

He also clarified that what INEC does with the IRev portal is uploading and not transmission of results.

“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 the same to the portal.”