The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has stated that Nigerians should not judge the commission based on the issue that occurred during the upload of the presidential election held throughout the country on February 25.
According to the EU’s chief observer, Barry Andrews, public trust in INEC was seriously harmed in the February 25 election due to the commission’s operational shortcomings and lack of transparency.
Andrews stated that while some corrective steps implemented in the March 18 governorship elections appeared to have had a good effect, overall trust was not restored, prompting civil society to seek for a neutral assessment of the entire process. Six priority recommendations were provided by the EU observation team.
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Festus Okoye, the national commissioner of INEC, pleaded with Nigerians not to judge the electoral process as a result of the difficulty the commission encountered in uploading the presidential election while responding to the final report on the 2023 general elections that the European Union Election Observation Mission submitted on Monday, June 26.
“It is not fair to judge the entire performance of the commission on the basis of a glitch in the result upload for the presidential election,” he said.
According to Okoye, the law has given political parties the authority to observe of what occurs at the voting centres.
“Almost all the political parties nominated and got accredited at least over 170,000 polling agents. What that means is that they had primary evidence of the results from the polling units. It is those results from the polling units, together with the BVAS as a machine itself that goes to the collation centre. So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result upload in order to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court,” he added.