Computer Society: Why INEC was unable to transmit election results electronically

Adesina Sodiya, president of Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), has given his take on why the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was unable to transmit results during the first phase of the general election.

In an interview with Technology Times, Sodiya spoke on the technology challenges that hindered the conduct of the presidential and national assembly elections.

INEC came under criticism over its failure to transmit election results from polling units using the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS).

Sodiya said a major cause of the problem is the lack of robustness of INEC’s platform.

“The second one that is not really major is the network because all the polling officers actually complained that it was network that did not allow them to be able to transmit the results. But everything is about the low robustness of their platform, you know,” he said.

“They have a distributed platform and it’s not too robust. And I thought that all these, they should have been able to evaluate, they should have able to subject the system to a kind of test that, and that is why we wanted to be involved too.”

He added that from his experience during the election, “some of the polling officers were complaining of the system not allowing them to have access to that platform to be able to transmit their results”.

‘OPERATIONAL ISSUES’ HINDERED INEC’S PERFORMANCE

Sodiya said most problems of technology faced by the INEC during the general election were caused by operational issues.

The electoral body had earlier said its system was not attacked during the election but only overwhelmed.

But Sodiya wondered why the system could be overwhelmed given the fact that the commission knows the number of polling units and population.

“You know that if you are not really an expert, if you are having cyber attacks, you might not even know it’s cyber attacks. You know it depends on the level,” he said.

“You might not even know it’s a cyber attack, you will just be thinking that something is wrong with your system. But I’m not even saying it’s a cyber attack, but it takes a certain knowledge of cyber security before you also be able to say that the problem you are facing is even cyber or not.

“Yes, it could be, it could also be a stress-based attack or like the chairman mentioned that the system was overwhelmed. Why would you be saying that your system was overwhelmed? You know your population. You know the polling units that you have. You have an idea of people that would want to be transmitting results at a point in time. You know you have all these. How well have they been able to prepare?

“Yes; they told us they were going to do trial elections, which they did. Who are the people involved in these trial elections?

“Did they take samples from the people that actually served as their polling officers or SDOs? Did they take samples from them? If they had used their staff, their staff wouldn’t have been the people that would conduct the election.

“So most of the problems they have, they are really operational. The technology they have adopted, I think that idea is good.”

Sodiya added that even with the best technology, there may still be problems if the “operational perspective” is not properly handled.