The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has addressed glitches experienced with uploading the results of the 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections.

The update comes on the heels of insinuations that the glitches were caused by the transfer of INEC’s former Director of ICT, Chidi Nwafor.

Providing clarification on Thursday in Abuja, the Chief Press Secretary to INEC Chairman, Rotimi Oyekanmi, stated that Nwafor’s transfer had nothing to do with the glitches.

According to him, the insinuation is nothing but an attempt to mislead members of the public.

“First, the IReV and Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) are two separate entities, and they are independent of each other.

“The relationship between the two is that the BVAS is used to transmit the picture of Form EC8A, which is the Polling Unit Result Sheet in PDF format, as well as the Voters’ Accreditation Data to the IREV.

“Therefore, the glitches suffered by the IReV for some hours on Feb. 25 could not have affected the functionality of the BVAS, which in any case, performed its duty excellently on election day.

“There’s also a provision for the BVAS to transmit the Polling Unit (PU) results in offline mode if there is no network at the polling unit at the time of the activity”, Oyekanmi said.

Speaking further, he added that the glitches could have still occurred even if Nwafor was still in charge.

“Recently, Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter had serious glitches that prevented many people, including me, from using those applications for many hours.

“But eventually, the respective companies surmounted the challenges.

“Now, would you say that the glitches occurred just because one engineer resigned from or was transferred within the company? Of course not.”

Oyekanmi also said, contrary to the claim that BVAS was an invention of Nwafor or any single staff member of the commission, the device was rather the commission’s idea and invention, just as the now rested Smart Card Reader (SCR).