INEC's document archive stopped serving in the last week of August 2026. A file that worked on the 26th returns 404 today
A polling-unit collection report for the 2023 Kogi governorship election served continuously, with an unchanged content digest, at captures in 2023, 2024, 2025 and on 15 August 2026. It now returns 404. Across the commission's whole upload tree, successful captures stop between 26 and 31 August 2026. We hold an inventory of 3,371 archived documents from it; a live sample of ninety returned 404 ninety times.
The file is prosaic: permanent voter card collection figures by polling unit for the 2023 Kogi State governorship election, published by the Independent National Electoral Commission at its own address. It is the kind of record that exists so a result can be checked afterwards.
The Internet Archive holds it at captures in November 2023, July 2024, December 2024, June 2025 and 15 August 2026. The content digest is identical at every one, so the document did not change across three years. We hold the archived copy: 1,075,471 bytes, 159 pages, complete. Requested from the commission's own site today, it returns 404.
It is not alone. Aggregating every archived capture of the commission's upload tree by day: on 25 August 2026, thirty-six captures returned 200. On 26 August, six returned 200. On 31 August, none did, and three returned 404. Through the whole of September, not one successful capture. The tree went dark in the last week of August.
The archive holds 3,371 unique documents from that tree. We took a live sample of ninety and requested each one. All ninety returned 404, none redirected.
The commission has a replacement. Its Resources and Document Hub advertises 330 items in total: 89 conference papers, 75 registration area centres, 40 newsletters, 39 downloads and plans, 19 nomination forms, 14 press releases and gazettes, 5 political party forms, 5 election observation material, 5 photographs. There is no results category. No polling-unit directories. No candidate lists.
We are careful with the arithmetic here, because 330 against 3,371 is not a like-for-like comparison. Some of the archived files are duplicates, drafts and ephemera rather than records, and the new hub may hold material the crawler never indexed. A site migration that abandons old upload paths is common and is not, by itself, evidence of anything.
The narrower claim survives all of that, and it is enough: documents that the commission was serving as recently as 26 August 2026 now return 404 with no redirect, and the commission's own replacement hub does not list them.
This is the second time the same pattern has cost us a source. INEC's 526-page report on the 2023 general election, the only official publication we found that gives any candidate's vote by geopolitical zone, also 404s on the live site; we could read it only through an archived capture of the commission's own file. That report is how we established the Labour Party's 2023 zonal figures. Had nobody archived it, that reporting would not have been possible.
Records of an election are not ordinary web content. They are the evidence for whether a result was what it was said to be, and the whole value of publishing them is that they stay where a citation can find them years later. Whatever the cause here, the effect is that a large part of that record now exists in public only because a third party kept a copy.
What this rests on
Archive capture records and our own live requests, made on 27 September 2026 and confirmed independently. The inventory and the day-by-day status were built from the archive index; the live sample was requested directly from the commission's site.
What this does not establish
It does not establish that anything was deliberately removed, or that the documents are lost to the commission. Site migrations routinely abandon old upload paths. It does not establish that the 3,371 archived files are all records rather than duplicates and ephemera, and 330 against 3,371 is not a like-for-like count. We have not asked the commission for its account, and that account belongs in any fuller version of this.
What we did ourselves
We dated the outage rather than merely noting it, by aggregating capture status day by day across the whole upload tree, and we tested it against a live sample instead of a single file.
Sources for this report
(A) Internet Archive captures of the INEC Kogi 2023 governorship PU PVC collection figures PDF at 20231117192409, 20240713022255, 20241213102723, 20250615021150 and 20260815131949, all carrying content digest DEY7UW5HMNUBGXILEJZKLVBN2TAPZO4E; the same URL returns HTTP 404 on 27 September 2026. Day-by-day capture status across the /wp-content/ tree: 36 successful on 2026-08-25, 6 on 2026-08-26, none from 2026-08-31 onward. Archived inventory of 3,371 unique PDFs; live sample of 90 returned 404 on all 90. INEC Resources and Document Hub, live 27 September 2026, listing 330 items across nine categories.
Confidence: high. This is our own assessment of whether the event occurred as described, separate from the grade, which describes what kind of thing the claim rests on.
Not obtained: where the underlying document is named above but not linked, we did not hold a copy at the time of publication. We purchase nothing and request nothing in our own name.
Corrections
None on this report. If you find an error, it will be published here, at the same length, with the date it was found, and the original wording will remain visible above it.