Following the conclusion of the presidential and National Assembly elections, questions have been raised about the performance of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the Election Result Viewing Portal (IReV) deployed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to enhance the electoral process. In this piece, Temitayo Jaiyeola examines how BVAS and IReV underperformed in their first national deployment.
The Independent National Electoral Commission’s BVAS and IReV did not live up to expectations during the recently concluded presidential and National Assembly elections. Their poor performance in this first major stress test may have cast a pall over the 2023 elections, as some candidates have already approached the courts to challenge the outcomes. Rather than simplifying the electoral process as intended, BVAS and IReV raised more questions about the integrity of the 2023 elections.
BVAS is a technological device that identifies and accredits voters through fingerprints and facial recognition. IReV is an online portal where polling‑unit results are uploaded directly from the polling unit, transmitted, and made available for public monitoring. IReV allows members of the public to create personal accounts and track uploaded results, thereby increasing transparency and integrity. INEC first deployed IReV for the Nasarawa Central by‑election in 2020, and according to reports it has since been used in 105 elections involving 16,694,461 registered voters, with 32,935 result sheets (Form EC8A) uploaded from both rural and urban polling units.
In 2021, INEC introduced BVAS to overcome over‑voting by accrediting voters through fingerprint, iris, and facial recognition, replacing card readers that had failed to read permanent voter cards properly. However, BVAS was riddled with problems from the start. During its first deployment in the Isoko South Constituency 1 by‑election in Delta State on 10 September 2021, presiding officers reported difficulties in capturing voters’ thumbs and faces. The same glitches reappeared during the presidential and National Assembly elections on 25 February 2023. Many BVAS devices failed to capture voters, and the IReV platform also malfunctioned in numerous polling units. In Rivers State, after BVAS initially failed to capture Governor Nyesom Wike, he expressed disappointment, noting that the slow performance of BVAS would likely prevent many people from voting. Similar malfunctions across the country disenfranchised voters and failed to curb over‑voting, leading to the cancellation of results in several units.
Prior to the election, INEC chairman Yakubu Mahmoud announced that results would be uploaded to the portal for real‑time public monitoring. He explained that BVAS would capture results, convert them to PDF, and upload them to the INEC Result Viewing Portal, where citizens could view polling‑unit results as they were processed. Mahmoud acknowledged that BVAS had never been deployed on a national scale but expressed confidence in the technology. In practice, many INEC officials could not upload results at polling units, forcing voters to wait for hours in vain. Officials blamed either the BVAS device or poor network connectivity. A Labour Party agent, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “We don’t have the network infrastructure to allow BVAS to work effectively… If the network were good, they would not have issues.” The All Progressives Congress National Chairman Abdullahi Adamu had previously doubted INEC’s ability to deliver a credible election using BVAS and IReV. Conversely, Ajibola Olude, COO of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, claimed the country’s network was mature enough for electronic result transmission.
By 7 p.m. on election day, Yiaga Africa reported that no results had been uploaded from any of the 176,606 polling units expected on INEC’s portal after voting closed. INEC eventually began uploading results and issued a public apology, attributing the delay to technical glitches caused by scaling IReV from a platform for off‑season state elections to one for nationwide general elections. The commission admitted that such glitches were “not unusual” and would be corrected.
In 2023, INEC received N305 billion from the Federal Government for the elections, budgeting N114.26 billion for ICT‑related expenses—far exceeding the N18.8 billion spent on ICT in the 2015 presidential and National Assembly elections. Yet, by 11:35 a.m. on 2 March 2023 (a day after declaring the APC candidate the winner), only 149,153 (84.5 %) of the 176,606 polling‑unit results had been uploaded to IReV. A software engineer, who wished to remain unnamed, suggested that sabotage, paid attackers, server overload, and poor training might have contributed to the failure. Another engineer, Emeka Okoye, emphasized that INEC had not performed load or stress testing on its servers—a standard global practice. He argued that INEC knew how many BVAS devices would connect, the voting timeline, and the expected traffic, yet failed to allocate sufficient resources. Okoye noted that the lack of testing made the system vulnerable, explaining why the upload rate remained below 95 % days after the election.
During the announcement of results in Abuja, several parties staged a walkout, citing INEC’s failure to upload polling‑unit results. Although INEC has declared the APC candidate the winner of the presidential election, many observers view the incomplete result uploads as a dark cloud over the process. Nigerians are no strangers to poor preparation and shoddiness in government initiatives, as seen in the National Identification Number registration and the rushed cashless policy. BVAS and IReV were meant to usher in a new dawn for Nigeria’s electoral process, but they appear to have maintained the status quo. Nonetheless, INEC has a chance at redemption as it conducts the governorship and state‑house of assembly elections on 11 March 2023.
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