INEC National Commissioner, Festus Okoye, stated this in response to the final report on the 2023 general elections submitted by the European Union Election Observation Mission on Monday.
“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,” Okoye stated
While it noted the challenge faced, Okoye stated that many Nigerians commended the electoral body for the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System in the general elections.
He also noted that political parties are now empowered by the law to know what goes on at the polling units.
“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 go to the collation centre. So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result uploads in order to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court,” he added.
In terms of voter accreditation, Okoye maintained that nobody has faulted the functionality of the BVAS.
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