Fresh debate over Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election has resurfaced following claims that figures displayed on an Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) platform showed a different picture of Peter Obi’s performance in Rivers State.
Supporters of the Labour Party candidate have continued to argue that the results uploaded to INEC’s Result Viewing Portal, known as IReV, provide evidence that Obi won the 2023 presidential election. The claim has again drawn attention to the technical problems that affected the electronic uploading of presidential results during the election.
INEC itself acknowledged that there was a problem with the IReV system during the February 25, 2023 presidential election. In its official report on the election, the commission said attempts to upload presidential polling-unit result sheets generated internal server errors.
According to INEC, the problem was linked to an unexpected configuration issue involving the mapping of uploaded presidential results to polling units. The commission said results for the Senate and House of Representatives elections could still be uploaded while the presidential uploads were affected.
However, the existence of the technical problem does not, on its own, establish that the national presidential result declared by INEC was incorrect.
INEC's election results system distinguishes between polling-unit result sheets and the formal collation and declaration process. For presidential elections, results move through ward and local government collation before being transmitted through the state collation process to the national level, where the presidential result is declared.
The commission's current website continues to provide access to its election-results archive and describes IReV as a platform for viewing polling-unit results and scanned result sheets.
The 2023 election was also challenged through Nigeria's judicial system, with the presidential election litigation forming part of the legal dispute that followed the poll. The courts considered the petitions and evidence presented by the parties before reaching their decisions.
As a result, claims that Obi “won the 2023 presidential election” should be distinguished from the documented fact that there was a technical failure affecting the upload of presidential results to IReV.
The Rivers State figures being cited in the current debate may be relevant to discussions about the election, but determining whether they prove a different national outcome requires examination of the original polling-unit result sheets, the legally recognised collation records and the evidence considered by the courts.
The renewed debate therefore highlights an important issue from the 2023 election: while INEC acknowledged an IReV technical failure, the interpretation of individual or state-level results remains a matter that must be supported by the complete electoral record rather than claims circulating online.