INEC chairman Mahmood Yakubu has announced that the commission is preparing a backup system for the upcoming governorship and state assembly elections. The move follows a series of setbacks in uploading the results of the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections. A code error in the server application caused the upload process to fail, and despite the efforts of INEC’s Information Technology team, the glitch could not be resolved promptly. This failure sparked nationwide anger, with political parties and many Nigerians accusing the electoral body of rigging and manipulation.
Our correspondent’s checks on Saturday showed that results from 168,711 of the 176,846 polling units—about 95 %—had been uploaded to the INEC portal. However, a Sunday report noted that just a day after the election, only 41,649 polling results—less than 30 %—were available on the viewing portal. The limited upload prompted party agents to protest, staging a walkout from the National Collation Centre in Abuja on February 27 and accusing INEC of favouring a particular party. They also claimed the commission had violated the Electoral Act by not uploading results before collation. Various interest groups similarly condemned INEC for the delay.
A week after the election, INEC had uploaded results from 159,509 polling units, representing 90 % of the total. Two weeks later, the commission posted results from 168,711 units. After the declaration of All Progressives Congress candidate Bola Tinubu as President‑elect, Labour Party candidate Peter Obi rejected the outcome and vowed to challenge it in court. Obi and Peoples Democratic Party candidate Atiku Abubakar subsequently took INEC to the Court of Appeal in Abuja.
A senior INEC official, speaking anonymously due to the sensitivity of the issue, explained that the technical glitch stemmed from a code error that repeatedly crashed the server, generating an HTTP 500 error. The commission has since resolved the problem and instituted a backup system. In preparation for the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections, INEC dispatched its tech teams to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). The appellate court granted the commission leave to reconfigure the more than 176,000 BVAS machines slated for use on March 18. An official confirmed that the Registration Area Technical Support (RATechs) who assisted during the February 25 election are now handling the nationwide reconfiguration, assuring that INEC has sufficient skilled staff, the technical issue has been fixed, and a backup plan is in place to prevent recurrence.
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