Lessons learned will be applied in the March 18 elections-INEC.

INEC, the Independent National Electoral Commission, claims to have learned from the February 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections.

The commission stated that significant efforts were being made to resolve issues with the Result Viewing Portal (IReV) ahead of the March 18 elections.

It further stated that “important lessons” learnt would be applied in the upcoming governorship and state assembly elections.

Festus Okoye, National Commissioner of INEC, revealed this on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.

Okoye also stated that the commission’s Technology section now knows what to do if there are problems with the posting of polling unit results to the IReV portal in the March 18 polls.

The INEC has introduced two new technologies for the accreditation and electronic transmission of votes for the 2023 general elections: the IReV and the BVAS.

Okoye stated that the IReV has received over 170,000 polling unit results from the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections.

He also stated that the BVAS reconfiguration would be finished on Tuesday in readiness for the March 18 elections.

“I’m confident that by Tuesday, when we hope to finish resettling the BVAS for the purposes of the gubernatorial and state assembly elections, the results in all of the sites where polls were held will have been forwarded to the accreditation backend,” he said.

During the presidential and National Assembly elections, opposition parties alleged that INEC personnel at polling stations were unable to electronically submit election results to the IReV.

The parties also objected to the manual compilation of results and the announcement of poll winners.

The electoral body vowed to remedy the problems, but opposition parties have gone to court to contest the victory of All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate Bola Tinubu, who was pronounced president-elect by the electoral umpire.

A Court of Appeal last week gave INEC permission to restructure BVAS for the gubernatorial and state assembly elections.

The commission then moved the governorship and state assembly elections from March 11 to March 18 to allow for BVAS machine reconfiguration.