Unanticipated system error was responsible for the glitch that affected upload of the Presidential election result on the INEC Result Viewing (IREV) during the 2023 general elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission has explained.

The Commission said a review of the system during the upload process showed that the system was encountering an unexpected configuration problem in mapping the presidential election results uploaded into the system to the participating Polling Units.

The INEC explanation is contained in the report of the commission?s stakeholder engagements and retreats carried out by the commission between July 11 and August 5, 2023 to review the conduct of the general elections.

Those at in the stakeholders? engagements include: leaders of the registered political parties, civil society organisations, Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) and Administrative Secretaries, security agencies under the Inter-agency Consultative Committee on Election Security and media executives.

The report said: ?During this review, many stakeholders repeatedly sought explanation for the technical glitch that affected the upload of the 2023 Presidential election results. During the review, details of the problem were provided by INEC?s technical experts.

?In a nutshell, the challenge of uploading the PU presidential election results on the IReV after the presidential and National Assembly elections on February 25 of 2023 was unique.?

Giving an insight into the problem which appeared to have cast some doubt on the credibility of the election, the report said: ?As voting ended across the country and POs began the process of uploading the images of the PU result sheets of the elections for the various constituencies around 4pm, the commission began to receive reports that the upload of presidential election result sheets was failing.

?Following these reports, the commission immediately engaged with its field officials for details to understand and trace the origin, source, scale and magnitude of the problem across the result management ecosystem to devise appropriate solutions.

?In the troubleshooting process, it was established that there was no issue in uploading the PU result sheets of the Senate and House of Representatives elections through the Election Result Modules. However, there was a problem with uploading the presidential election results to the system.

?Attempts to upload the results were generating internal server errors, which refer to a significant impairment that usually originate from within an application due to problems relating to configuration, permissions, or failure to create or access application resources correctly.

?Further interrogation of the Election Result Modules indicated that the system is encountering an unexpected configuration problem in mapping the presidential election results uploaded into the system to the participating PUs.

?Due to the complex, sensitive and critical nature of the systems and the real potential for malicious cyber-attacks, the commission immediately put in place several strict security and audit control measures to prevent any unfettered or elevated access to the Result Upload System.?

The report, copies of which have been made available to the Senate and House of Representatives Committee on Electoral Matters, also revealed that ?in the process of resolving the challenge, it was discovered that the backend system of the IReV was able to query and detect the base States for uploading the PU result sheets based on the mapping of all senatorial district and federal constituency elections to the respective 36 states of the Federation and the FCT as established in the database structure deployed within the system.

?In configuring and mapping the election results for the presidential and National Assembly elections, the commission created 470 election types consisting of one presidential constituency covering the entire country, 109 senatorial districts and 360 federal constituencies.

?Each senatorial district and federal constituency election on the database was mapped to their respective states. However, the presidential election result is a single, countrywide constituency and therefore, does not belong to any one state.

?Consequently, while the uploads for the National Assembly elections succeeded as the application was able to identify the respective state and build the folder hierarchy for the results organisation process for the election, attempts to upload the presidential election results sheets, which does not belong to or mapped to any State on the database, failed.

?Instead, it returned a HTTP server error response. This failure is attributable to the inability of the application to create and build a folder structure to organise the uploaded images of the result sheets of the presidential election.

?Having identified and established the source of the problem, the commission quickly created and deployed ?Hotfixes? which are software updates for fixing a bug or any vulnerability in a system. The deployed hotfixes eventually resolved the HTTP error on the system and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8.55pm on the 25th February 2023.

The report also said even after the problem was resolved, the results could not immediately be uploaded due to the large volume of result that has been sent from the polling units and awaiting to be uploaded and also partly because the polling officers had left their station and the BVAS switched off.

It said: ?After the problem with the upload was resolved, the Commission noticed a high volume of uploads on the queue. All results that were scanned but could not be uploaded due to the error were queued waiting to be automatically processed.

?Due to the large volume and high traffic from the queue, the system was running slower, even though it tried to scale up automatically to handle the unanticipated heavy traffic.

?While the density of the traffic that slowed the upload was one issue, the requirement that the BVAS devices to be switched on and connected to the internet for the upload of results in the offline queue was another.

?However, some of the POs had at the time left their PUs, and the devices had either been switched-off, or were out of internet coverage. Switched off devices could not connect and upload the results sheets.

?It would be recalled that on 4th February 2023, about three weeks to the General Election, the commission conducted a mock exercise to test the transmission of election results from PUs to the IReV. This was a general test that was not specific to any given election.

?Perhaps had this mock exercise been tailored to specific elections, the hitch that was experienced in uploading Presidential election results would have been detected on time.

?Consequently, a major lesson for the Commission is that in addition to other technical and administrative preconditions, time is critical to the deployment of election technology. Adequate time to develop, test, embed and publicise the technology is essential to its success?.

On the management of election results, the report said: ?The scanning of the Polling Unit results for display on the IReV drastically curtailed opportunities to manipulate results between the PUs and the collation centres. This is because the public already had records of the results before collation.

?Furthermore, the use of the Collation Support and Result Verification System (CSRVS), which supports and expedites collation, making for the improved management of election results.? (The Nation)

Update news