The Many Sins of INEC How the 2023 Elections Exposed INEC’s Incompetence

During the 2023 elections, INEC had all the tools it needed to pass its own self-designed test to deliver this year’s elections credibly through technology. However, the electoral commission’s many failures have meant great losses to its credibility. 

In the run-up to the 2023 elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) promised to deliver to Nigerians ‘the best elections ever’. The backbone of this promise was to be its implementation of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and INEC Election Result Viewing Portal (IReV) technologies, two revolutionary tools that the commission swaggered would address the problems of overvoting and delays in result transmission. Yet, more than a month since Bola Tinubu was declared the winner, Nigerians still remain divided over the results, with different camps claiming purported victory for the first and second runners-up, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, respectively. The 25 February election was the most keenly contested since 1979 so some dispute was to be expected...

 

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