The Independent National Electoral Commission (NEC) has dispelled claims of irregularities in its results of the off-season governorship elections in Kogi, Bayelsa and Imo states held on November 11, 2023.
Assistant Director in the Electoral Operations Department of INEC, Mrs Anne Aderibigbe, told Daily Trust yesterday that the commission conducted free, fair and credible elections in the three states.
The Kimpact Development Initiative (KDI) had earlier in the day alleged inconsistencies in the results announced by NEC and the result viewing portal (IREV) for the elections in the three states.
The organisation said this in its 75-page report titled, ‘Beyond the figures: A statistical evaluation of results from the IREV portal for the 2023 Bayelsa, Imo and Kogi governorship elections.”
The Team Lead of KDI, Mr Bukola Idowu, said the report, carried out under the Ballot Integrity Project (BIP), analysed the election results data available on the IREV and evaluated the overall integrity of the electoral process in the 2023 Bayelsa, Imo and Kogi States off-cycle elections and found irregularities.
But INEC said the research is only partially complete, as it is limited to only one of the mechanisms, which is the IREV put in place to check the integrity and consistency of election results.
“The researchers have no access to our back-end integrity process, such as the accreditation of the data, use of BVAS at the very first level of collation, such as the number of polling units and wards that were cancelled and have such no impact to the final declaration of the results.
“Most of the issues raised in the study as presented here are precisely the subject of these integrity checks.
“And so, when you remove this integrity check mechanism from the whole of this study, a lot is yet to be completed with this study. So, this study dealt with only the PU results,” INEC said.