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The Independent National Electoral Commission has confirmed that it was yet to fully upload results of the presidential election held on February 25 on its results viewing portal IReV.
This is contrary to the commission’s pledge ahead of the election that results would be uploaded from polling units as soon as voting ended on election day.
INEC spokesman, Festus Okoye, disclosed on Thursday in an interview on Channels Television’s “Politics Today” programme.
Asked “how many” of the presidential election results have been uploaded on the server, Mr Okoye said “well, I don’t have the figure offhead, but a substantial number of the results are already on the IReV.”
Speaking further, Mr Okoye argued that it is impossible to have all results uploaded on IReV because elections did not hold in some polling units and areas where elections were disrupted by violence will have no result on the IReV.
“You cannot fully upload all the results. Because there were places where elections were not held. Because of some of those polling units we do not have registered voters. So you don’t expect results from the IREV from all these other polling units where we did not deploy,” Mr Okoye said.
“Secondly, in places where there was violent disruption of elections, you don’t expect results from those polling units. It will not be right to expect that the IREV will contain results from 176, 606 polling units.”
Mr Okoye declined to further comment on why it took the commission this long to upload the results because it is an issue before the court.
INEC on March 1 declared Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress winner of the election, despite calls for cancellation of the process by opposition parties due to the umpires failure to upload results on its server.
Opposition parties led by Atiku Abubakar of Peoples Democratic and Peter Obi of Labour Party are both challenging Mr Tinubu’s victory before the Presidential Election Tribunal.