INEC Opens Up on Why the Upload of 2023 Presidential Election Results Failed

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has shed light on the technical glitch that prevented the upload of presidential election results on the INEC Result Viewing (IREV) portal during the 2023 general elections.

According to INEC, the issue was caused by an unanticipated system error that occurred while mapping presidential election results to participating polling units.

The commission said this error led to internal server errors, which prevented the upload of results.

The INEC explanation is contained in the report from the commission’s stakeholder engagements and retreats held between July 11 and August 5, 2023, to review the conduct of the general elections. 

Participants in these engagements included leaders of registered political parties, civil society organizations, Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs), Administrative Secretaries, security agencies under the Inter-agency Consultative Committee on Election Security, and media executives.

Copies of the report have been made available to the Senate and House of Representatives Committee on Electoral Matters.

The report said: “During this review, many stakeholders repeatedly sought explanation for the technical glitch that affected the upload of the 2023 Presidential election results. During the review, details of the problem were provided by INEC’s technical experts.

“In a nutshell, the challenge of uploading the PU presidential election results on the IReV after the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25 of 2023 was unique.”

The report added, “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 4pm, the commission began to receive reports that the upload of presidential election result sheets was failing.

“Following these reports, the commission immediately engaged with its field officials for details 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.

“Attempts to upload the results were generating internal server errors, which refer to a significant impairment that usually originate from within an application due to problems relating to configuration, permissions, or failure to create or access 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 PUs.

“Due to the complex, sensitive and critical nature of the systems and the real potential for malicious cyber-attacks, 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.”

The report also revealed that “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 National Assembly elections, the commission created 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.

“Consequently, while the uploads for the National Assembly 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 a 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 vulnerability 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 8.55pm on the 25th 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.

“While the density of the traffic that slowed the upload was one issue, the requirement that the BVAS devices to be switched on and connected to the internet for the upload of results in the offline queue was another.

“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.

“It would be recalled that on 4th February 2023, about three weeks to the General Election, the commission conducted a mock exercise to test the transmission of election results from PUs to the IReV. This was a general test that was not specific to any given election.

“Perhaps had this mock exercise been tailored to specific elections, the hitch that was experienced in uploading Presidential election results would have been detected on time.

“Consequently, a major lesson for the Commission is that in addition to other technical and administrative preconditions, time is critical to the deployment of election technology. Adequate time to develop, test, embed and publicise the technology is essential to its success”.

On the management of election results, the report said:  “The scanning of the Polling Unit results for display on the IReV drastically curtailed opportunities to manipulate results between the PUs and the collation centres. This is because the public already had records of the results before collation.

“Furthermore, the use of the Collation Support and Result Verification System (CSRVS), which supports and expedites collation, making for the improved management of election results.”

The election was won by Bola Tinubu but was challenged to the Supreme Court by opposition candidates.