The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced on Sunday that results from more than 170,000 polling units in the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections have been uploaded to its Result Viewing Portal. INEC National Commissioner Festus Okoye made the statement on Channels Television’s programme *Sunday Politics*.
Okoye explained that the commission is reconfiguring the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) for the upcoming governorship and state assembly elections. He noted that any BVAS used in the presidential and National Assembly elections that did not push data to the accreditation backend will not be reconfigured. “The BVAS will not allow itself to be reconfigured or reset unless the entire data set is pushed to the accreditation backend,” he said. He expects that by Tuesday, when the BVAS re‑settling is completed, all results from the recent elections will have been transferred to the accreditation backend.
The commissioner affirmed that every Nigerian has a constitutional and legal right to protest, but warned that no political party will be permitted to access the BVAS’s internal data or voter biometrics. He emphasized that INEC remains the regulator of political parties and will not abdicate its core responsibilities to aggrieved parties. Regarding a court judgment allowing the use of temporary voter cards, Okoye clarified that it applies only to the individuals who obtained the court order, not to all voters.
Okoye also blamed some political parties for making polling units inaccessible, which contributed to low voter turnout in the last elections. He said INEC has learned valuable lessons from the presidential and National Assembly polls that will be applied to the forthcoming governorship and state assembly elections. Significant efforts are underway to resolve challenges with the IReV portal before the March 18 polls, and the commission’s ICT department is prepared to address any issues with uploading polling‑unit results.
On the deployment of agents, Okoye noted that political parties sent more polling‑unit agents than the number of officials deployed by the commission, allowing them to monitor results at each unit. He cited the Electoral Act 2022, which grants every registered party and its candidates the right to send agents to every polling unit. The figures he provided are as follows: the PDP deployed 176,588 agents, the Labour Party 134,874, the NNPP 176,200, and the APC 176,223. In contrast, the commission deployed officials to 176,666 polling units. Consequently, each party received a copy of Form EC 8—the polling‑unit result sheet—that is uploaded to the IReV portal.
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