INEC: Why 2023 election results failed to upload on portal

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has spoken about the technical glitch experienced in uploading the results of the 2023 presidential election to its results viewing portal.

INEC, in the 2023 general election report released on Friday, February 23, 2024, said the glitch didn’t affect the credibility of the election, noting that the poll was peaceful and orderly nationwide.

It, however, said a key challenge that impacted on the public perception of the election and elicited widespread commentary was the failure to upload Polling Unit (PU) results of the presidential election to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal in real-time at the close of the polls on February 25, 2023.

INEC described IReV portal as one of the most significant innovations introduced prior to the 2023 general election to promote the integrity and transparency of the electoral process, showing the images of the original Polling Unit result sheets as recorded in Form EC8A.

The system was first deployed during Nasarawa Central State Constituency by election in August 2020 and tested in 105 subsequent elections, including three off-cycle governorship elections.

INEC noted that the system had tremendously improved public confidence in the integrity and transparency of the commission’s result management process.

It, however, said the challenge of uploading the PU presidential election results on the IReV after the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25 was unique.

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It stated that the commission began to receive reports around 4 p.m. across the country that attempts to upload presidential election result sheets were failing.

INEC said: “Following these reports, the commission immediately engaged with its field officials for details in order to understand, and trace the origin, source, scale and magnitude of the problem across the result management ecosystem to devise appropriate solutions.

“In the troubleshooting process, it was established that there was no issue in uploading the PU result sheets of the Senate and House of Representatives elections through the Election Result Modules.

“However, there was a problem with uploading the presidential election results to the system.”

INEC added that attempts to upload the results were generating internal server errors, which refer to a significant impairment that usually originates from within an application due to problems relating to configuration, permissions, or failure to create or access application resources correctly.

The electoral umpire said: “Further interrogation of the Election Result Modules indicated that the system is encountering an unexpected configuration problem in mapping the presidential election results uploaded into the system to the participating Polling Units.

“Due to the complex, sensitive and critical nature of the systems and the real potential for malicious cyberattacks, the commission immediately put in place several strict security and audit control measures to prevent any unfettered or elevated access to the result upload system.

“In the process of resolving the challenge, it was discovered that the backend system of the IReV was able to query and detect the base States for uploading the PU result sheets.

“Based on the mapping of all Senatorial District and Federal Constituency elections to the respective 36 States of the Federation and the FCT as established in the database structure deployed within the system.”

“In configuring and mapping the election results for the presidential and NASS elections, the Commission created 470 election types consisting of one presidential constituency covering the entire country, 109 Senatorial Districts and 360 Federal Constituencies.

“Consequently, while the uploads for the NASS elections succeeded as the application was able to identify the respective State and build the folder hierarchy for the results organisation process for the election, attempts to upload the presidential election results sheets, which does not belong to or mapped to any state on the database, failed.

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“Instead, it returned a HTTP server error response. This failure is attributable to the inability of the application to create and build a folder structure to organize the uploaded images of the result sheets of the presidential election.”

INEC said having identified and established the source of the problem, it quickly created and deployed “Hotfixes” which were software updates for fixing a bug or any vulnerabilities in a system.

It added that the deployed hotfixes eventually resolved the HTTP error on the system and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8:55 p.m. on February 25.

The Star