Ahead of the announcement of the first official preliminary results by the National Elections Commission (NEC) after Tuesday’s poll, a website named Smart Elections Results Management System has been sharing what it claims are results of the October 10 polls.
Claim
Smart Elections Results Posting preliminary elections results
Rating Justification
To verify this website, we first observed that the site does not have an about section or any other basic information on its operations. At the bottom of the web page the site says it is powered by Smart Systems.
Smart System is a software development and Management Consultancy company which developed online school software that is been used in AME University, Stella Maris Polytechnic University, Cuttington University, and other universities in and out of Monrovia.
To further fact check the credibility of the Smart Election Results Management System, we first called Smart System through the inquiry numbers on the site. The software development company answered our call and said they have not created any website named Smart Election Results Management System.
We further tested the site using online site which discloses the domain ownership information and safety rating of websites.
Whois an online domain ownership information and registration tool shows that the website was created on January 18, 2017 but was updated on January 20, 2023.
This shows that the website only gets active in election year.
The URL of the website is another big clue to have doubts about the credibility of the site. It starts with “http” instead of “https” and it does not begin with the site name but instead it starts with smartsystemslib.com.
Conclusion
Based on the evidence, we conclude that the site is malicious and has no authority to publish elections results. The NEC will announce the first round of preliminary result on October 12, 2023.
This report was developed with the support of Internews through the USAID Media Activity project. The funder has no say in the editorial decision leading to the production of this content.
Thanks for the fact checking on these claims of false and misleading information that have gone rampant on the media
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