The Supreme Court said although the glitches did not impede result collation, they impacted negatively public confidence in the disputed presidential election.
The Supreme Court on Thursday said the malfunctioning of the INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal during Nigeria’s presidential election on 25 February reduced public confidence in the electoral process.
Delivering judgement on two separate appeals filed by Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi to nullify President Bola Tinubu’s election victory, a seven-member panel of the court held that although the IReV glitches did not impede result collation, they impacted negatively public perception of the disputed presidential election.
“Truth must be told, the non-functioning of the IReV may have also reduced the confidence of the voting public in the electoral process,” Inyang Okoro, the presiding justice, who read the court’s lead decision, said.
IReV is an online platform designed to receive and display photographic copies of polling unit results.
IReV is an online platform where photographic pictures of polling unit results are meant to be uploaded using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines as soon as voting and collation end at the various voting units.
INEC had promised ahead of the last general elections that the results would be uploaded to IReV promptly.
But it failed to fulfill the promise with results ending up taking days to weeks to be uploaded to IReV for the public to access. The commission blamed the delay on unforeseen system glitches.
However, the failure became a rallying point for opposition presidential candidates who lost the February 2023 vote. Alleging widespread fraud during the election, they maintained that the poll was invalidated by INEC’s failure to promptly upload the polling unit results to IReV as prescribed in the guidelines for the election.
At the presidential election court hearing, Mr Obi’s expert witness, Mpeh Ogar, a Web engineer, testified that the health status of Amazon Web Services which hosts the INEC IReV portal showed that there were no technical glitches on 25 February.
Toeing the same line of argument, Atiku had contended that a key issue was that the electoral umpire allowed a third-party device to hijack the electronic INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal during the presidential election, creating a loophole for Mr Tinubu to manipulate poll results.
The Presidential Election Petition Court, in September, dismissed the opposition candidates’ arguments about the IReV, a major thrust of their petitions, and affirmed the victory of President Tinubu. The court insisted that IReV had no place in the legal process of counting and collation of results.
Displeased, the opposition candidates raised the issue in their appeals at the Supreme Court challenging the verdict of the presidential election court.
‘Non-functioning of IReV didn’t affect collation of results’
But deciding the issue on Thursday, Mr Okoro said the INEC is empowered by the Electoral Act “to determine the electronic device to be used during elections.
“The court below (presidential election court) held that IReV portal is not a collation system,” adding that the manual polling unit results would suffice in dealing with manual collation of results.
The court held that the non-transmission of polling unit results in real-time did not substantially affect the outcome of the election.