Rinu Oduala, a social media influencer, has uploaded a series of videos claiming unauthorised persons were uploading fake election results to the result viewing portal.
According to the tweet, which has now been seen more than one million times, Oduala said “unauthorized people are currently logged into INEC server, uploading results different from what was voted at polling booths across the country today”.
She suggests that the INEC result viewing portal “may be compromised right now”.
Verification
CDD Election War Room analysed the videos in question, inspecting the source codes for the URLs shared in the video, and could not find any evidence of manipulation of the INEC website.
The third video shows the website URL where the so-called result upload was recorded from. According to the video, the upload was done from “whale-app-8bc7r.ondigitalocean.app not the INEC website https://inecelectionresults.ng/
We also contacted a systems engineer at INEC, who confirmed that the website has no link to iREV or any of INEC’s web services. We asked for more details on iREV but were told that giving more information may put the commission’s web security architecture at risk.
CDD Election War Room also reviewed the videos with two web developers, who confirmed that iREV is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and not Digital Ocean as the video shows. Therefore, the website where the upload was being done is not the INEC website.
We checked the URL in question where the upload was said to have been done and found that the site has been taken down. According to Whois, a web data verification site, the last update to the suspicious website was done on February 24, 2023, a day before election.
In addition to this, the mode of operation for the IReV portal does not include manual entry of polling results from polling units. In contrast, for IReV, presiding officers take a picture of the election results and upload the same in PDF without any manual entry of results as the video shows.
In addition to this, the original IReV portal does not carry any party’s logo as the other website shows. The form EC 8A does not carry any party’s logo — just acronyms.
Verdict
The claim is false; the website in the video is not the IReV portal. In fact, it is hosted on an entirely different service. INEC officials also confirmed told CDD Election War Room that the claims are false.
Editor’s Note: This report has been updated to reflect the full digital ocean URL
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