Preliminary findings have identified that the glitch was caused by a human error – FEO

The Fijian Elections Office says preliminary findings have identified that the glitch in the release of the results process in the 2022 general elections was a human error rather than a system error.

This has been highlighted in the 2022 general elections Supervisor of Elections Report.

According to the report, in the process of manually transferring the data from the Results Management and Information System to the FEO Results App, the wrong set of data was mistakenly transferred from the system database to the FEO Results App.

It says FEO is aware of the public interest in the glitch incident and at the time of releasing this report it is facilitating an external audit of the Results Management and Information System and Results App to determine the actual cause of it and if there was any third party interference.

It says a thorough report into this incident will be published at a later date upon conclusion of the external audit.

Former Supervisor of Elections, Mohammed Saneem in a press conference a day after the elections had apologised to the public that they had to take down the FEO app and results platform because when they published the result with about 507 polling stations, they detected an anomaly in which they noted certain candidates had the results like 28,000 and 14,000 on the app.

He had said that to cure this, they had to review the entire mechanism through which they were pushing out results.

Saneem had said the result management system is an offline system and the staging laptop is used to transmit the result to the app and the website.

He said that in one instance, the upload had been interrupted mid-way and this caused the mismatch of the ID of the candidate in the app to the staging laptop and as the vote numbers changed to certain candidates who suddenly got allocated the votes in the app.

Saneem had said they had deleted the data that had been published and then re-uploaded the data on the app.

Questions have been sent to the FEO. They are yet to respond.