Chief Joe-Kyari Gadzama SAN has asked the NBA’s Electoral Committee (ECNBA) to perform an audit of the current election, which raises the possibility that the controversy that surrounded the three previous NBA National Elections that used electronic voting won’t go away. Today’s election is over at midnight.
The presidential candidate demanded “a forensic audit of the election and the result logs” in a petition to the chairman of the electoral committee titled “Complaints Against Fundamental National Election Irregularities and Non-Compliance in the NBA National Election.”
Gadzama outlined several complaints against the election in a letter dated July 16, 2022 and signed by an ICT expert and his sole Agent in the ECNBA Situation Room, Mr. Andrew Agbo-Madaki, saying that at yesterday’s ECNBA stakeholders’ briefing, “several agents complained about the last-minute briefing which did not allow ample time for the agents and IT experts of the candidates to test the voting system and portal.”
While the electoral umpire had previously stated that voters would have access to live results, he pointed out that “only agents in the situation room had access to the live results.”
Agents requested backend access to evaluate the voting site in accordance with the petition, but “this request was declined,” it states.
“It is also important to state that between the hours of 1am and 3am there were repeated error messages while viewing the live results (error: 502 bad gateway) despite assurances of the ECNBA and the technology provider INITS limited on the suitability of the voting site www.electionbuddy.com,” Gadzama said. An erroneous answer from the upstream Server was received by the server while serving as a gateway or proxy, as indicated by the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 502 Bad Gateway server error response code.
The letter added that “this makes us doubt the integrity and efficiency of the site which promised to manage a 100,000 voter capacity,” alluding to the possibility that this may have compromised the voting portal.
Additionally, it was noted in the petition that “Agents and stakeholders were (sic) also sought graphical depiction of the data which would reveal specifics according to branches. The election era did not see the release of this.
The ECNBA Situation Room’s viewing screen occasionally went out, which caused some of the agents to become irritated, according to sources.
It is believed that the concept that a single LED screen in the NBA Annex somehow controls the voting is absurd. According to an ECNBA source, the outages had no effect on the server or the election outcomes.
