BY GODWIN OBI
The Bayelsa Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) Obo Effanga maintains that polling unit results will be uploaded on the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) for the Bayelsa, Kogi, and Imo governorship polls.
While the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Mahmood Yakubu had reportedly said results won’t be uploaded on the IReV, Effanga maintained that the electoral body will be deploying it for the off-season elections billed for November 11th, 2023.
“The IReV has come to stay just like the BVAS has come to stay. IReV was first used in 2020 by INEC. It is the INEC result viewing portal. It is a portal where polling unit results are uploaded – photos of the polling unit results. INEC has been doing that since 2020 and will continue to do that,” he said.
According to him the portal is ready and was used in the recent mock accreditation held ahead of the elections. He is confident that with the deployment of technology, the polls will be hitch-free.
“Yes, it is ready to go. Yesterday when we had the mock accreditation, we used the IReV portal to upload information from the mock accreditation. In the locations where we did the accreditation, people came and got accreditation. That information was recorded on the BVAS – that is the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System,” Effanga added.
“At the end of it, we also had a mock result sheet which we also used the BVAS to take a photograph of, and that was uploaded on the IReV.”
His comment came months after Nigeria conducted its general election. While INEC had promised to immediately transmit photos of polling unit results on IReV – an online platform and using BVAS – the electoral umpire failed to do so.
Instead, the results took days to weeks before getting on the portal with the agency blaming technical glitches.
The development became a talking point in the wake of the presidential election with opposition candidates claiming the poll was not credible. They pinned it – among others – on INEC’s failure to upload the results on IReV as it earlier promised.
But the Presidential Election Petition Court dismissed their petitions about IReV, saying the electoral umpire can use any method it deems fit to collate results. It thus affirmed President Bola Tinubu’s February victory.
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