Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has admitted that a glitch affected the seamless operation of the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) during the 2023 presidential election.
Gatekeepers News reports that INEC primarily attributed the glitch to the intricate, sensitive, and critical nature of the systems, coupled with the genuine threat of malicious cyber attacks.
The IReV portal is one of the most significant innovations introduced by the electoral body before the 2023 General Elections to promote the integrity and transparency of the electoral process.
As a public-facing website, the IReV portal shows the images of the original Polling Unit result sheets as recorded in Form EC8A.
The commission has, however, acknowledged that the IReV portal experienced challenges during the 2023 General Elections.
INEC disclosed this in a document released on Friday, February 23, 2024, titled “Reports of the General Election”.
The 526-page long report was published by the commission on its website.
The report partly read, “The challenge of uploading the PU presidential election results on the IReV after the presidential and NASS elections on 25th February 2023 was unique.
“As voting ended across the country and POs began the process of uploading the images of the PU result sheets of the elections for the various constituencies around 4:00 pm, the commission began to receive reports that attempts to upload presidential election result sheets were failing.
“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.”
INEC admitted there was a configuration error which was discovered when its technical expertise team embarked on resolving the server error. It added that the issue was only peculiar to the presidential election which was held on the same day as the national assembly elections.
It said, “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. 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 the application resources correctly.
“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 Four Hundred and Seventy (470) election types consisting of one presidential constituency covering the entire country, 109 Senatorial Districts and 360 Federal Constituencies. Each Senatorial District and Federal Constituency election on the database was mapped to their respective states.
“However, the presidential election result is a single, countrywide constituency and therefore, does not belong to any one state.”
The electoral commission, while explaining how the agency addressed the “server error” issue, said, “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.
“Instead, it returned an HTTP server error response. This failure is attributable to the inability of the application to create
and build a folder structure to organise the uploaded images of the result sheets of the presidential election.
“Having identified and established the source of the problem, the commission quickly created and deployed “Hotfixes” which are software updates for fixing a bug or any vulnerabilities in a system.
“The deployed hotfixes eventually resolved
the HTTP error on the system and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8.55 pm on the
25th of February 2023.
“After the problem with the upload was resolved, the commission noticed a high volume of uploads on the queue. All results that were scanned but could not be uploaded due to the error were queued waiting to be automatically processed.
“Due to the large volume and high traffic from the queue, the system was running slower, even though it tried to scale up automatically to handle the unanticipated heavy traffic.
“The density of the traffic that slowed the uploads was one issue. Another was that the offline queue required the BVAS devices to be switched on and connected to the internet for the upload.
“However, some of the POs had at the time left their PUs, and the devices had either been switched off or were out of internet coverage. Switched-off devices could not connect and upload the results sheets.
“The commission had to reach out to the POs of affected areas to switch on their systems and ensure internet connectivity
for the uploads to continue. This accounted for the delay, with some of the results coming in the next day.”
INEC also noted that the glitch experienced in uploading the scanned images of PU
presidential election result sheets on 25th February 2023 was due to the inherent complexity within the System, which
was difficult to anticipate and mitigate.
Notably, it insisted that there has been room for improvement.
The commission added, “Thereafter, the commission has made improvements on the IReV and taken additional steps to build more resilience and undertook additional checks to ensure the stability and optimal operation and performance of the IReV portal.
“Additional quality assurance checks are now done to complement the end-to-end testing of the entire result upload ecosystem before the conduct of any election.”
INEC also said the glitch did not in any way affect the outcome of the presidential election result.
The document read further, “However, the glitch in the upload of the presidential results sheets to iREV did not affect the credibility of the election.
“Agents of political parties and security agents were given copies of polling station results after they were announced in public. The results were also displayed at polling units for scrutiny by voters.
“So when they were eventually uploaded, it was easy to compare them with the copies displayed at polling centres and given to party agents and party officials.”
The INEC Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakub in the foreword of the report stated, “This report documents the major activities the Commission carried out in the preparation and conduct of the General Election, beginning from mid-2019.
“This early preparation was in keeping with what has become the Commission’s practice of long-range systematic planning
and execution of the country’s elections since 2010.”
