The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has denied that there was deliberate attempt to waste taxpayers money following its inability to upload all results of the February 25 presidential election on its Result Viewing Portal (iReV).
Recall that in March, INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, admitted some glitches experienced during the conduct of presidential and National Assembly polls.
However, Festus Okoye, INEC spokesman, in an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme, said it is wrong to accuse INEC of wasting taxpayers money in the 2023 general elections on account of the technical “glitches” experienced during the transfer of results.
Okoye argued that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was successfully used for voter accreditation, and result upload for the polls.
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“We are only talking about result uploads for the presidential election only. It is not true or correct to insinuate even remotely that taxpayers’ money was wasted and the machine did not work,” Okoye said.
It was gathered that Okoye had earlier revealed that glitch experienced in the upload of the February 25 presidential election in the country should not write off the entire polls held nationwide.
“It is not fair to judge the entire performance of the commission on the basis of a glitch in the result upload for the presidential election,” he said.
According to Okoye, the law has empowered political parties to know what goes on at the polling units.
“Almost all the political parties nominated and got accredited at least over 170,000 polling agents. What that means is that they had primary evidence of the results from the polling units.
“It is those results from the polling units, together with the BVAS as a machine itself that goes to the collation centre. So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result upload in order to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court,” he added.
