INEC, The Independent National Electoral Commission has refuted allegations of squandering taxpayers’ money following a technical glitch in uploading all the presidential election results onto its Result Viewing Portal (IReV) on February 25. INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, had previously acknowledged some issues encountered during the conduct of the presidential and National Assembly polls in March.
In a recent interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today, INEC spokesperson Festus Okoye expressed that claiming that the electoral body wasted taxpayers’ funds is inaccurate. Okoye clarified that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was effectively utilized for voter accreditation and result upload during the polls
We are specifically referring to the result upload for the presidential election only. It is unfounded and untrue to remotely insinuate that taxpayers’ money was squandered and the machine failed,” stated Okoye.
Earlier, Okoye emphasized that the glitch encountered during the upload of the February 25 presidential election results should not undermine the overall credibility of the nationwide polls. He urged Nigerians not to judge the electoral commission solely based on the challenges experienced during the presidential election upload.
“It would be unfair to evaluate the commission’s entire performance based on a setback in result upload for the presidential election,” he remarked. Okoye pointed out that political parties have the legal authority to monitor activities at the polling units, stating, “Almost all the political parties nominated and accredited over 170,000 polling agents. This implies that they possessed primary evidence of the results from the polling units.”
He further explained that these results, combined with the BVAS system, are submitted to the collation center. Therefore, it is incorrect for a political party to rely solely on result upload to gather the evidence necessary to pursue legal actions in court
