Nigeria's Electoral Integrity - Why the Hybrid System is a Strength, not A Weakness

The recent legislative process amending Nigeria’s Electoral Act has reignited a critical national debate: the method of transmitting election results. A vocal public outcry has centred on the National Assembly’s decision not to mandate a compulsory, real-time electronic transmission of results. While the demand for absolute transparency is understandable and valid, a closer examination reveals that the existing legal and technological framework—a deliberate hybrid model—represents one of the most robust electoral integrity systems in emerging democracies today. This perspective argues that the current system, when fully implemented, is more than adequate to protect the people’s vote and may, in fact, be more secure than a mandated, fully automated real-time transmission.

1. Understanding the Amendment: Clarifying the Legislative Intent

Contrary to widespread reporting, the recent legislative action did not “remove” electronic transmission. The core of the amendment was the rejection of a clause seeking to compel “real-time” electronic transmission as a strict legal requirement. The Senate retained the existing provision from the 2022 Electoral Act, which empowers the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to determine the procedure for transmitting results.

This distinction is crucial. It moves the issue from the realm of rigid legal mandate—which could criminalise technical failures—to the domain of operational procedure managed by the electoral body. The law already provides for electronic transmission via the BVAS to the IReV portal. The debate centres on compulsion and immediacy, rather than the existence of the technological channel itself.

2. The Robust Architecture of Nigeria’s Current Electoral System

The strength of Nigeria’s system lies in its multi-layered, parallel processes for verification, which create redundancy and make large-scale fraud exceptionally difficult.

Layer 1: The Physical Audit Trail (The Legal Gold Standard): At the close of polls, the result (Form EC8A) is filled out, signed, and stamped by all accredited party agents and the presiding officer. This is not a mere formality; it is the creation of a legally binding document at the most foundational level—the polling unit. Every party agent receives a copy, enabling immediate parallel collation by political parties. This process ensures local accountability and produces a human-verifiable paper trail that cannot be hacked or deleted.
Layer 2: Technological Transparency (The Public Viewfinder): Following the physical signing, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) is used to capture a photographed image of the completed Form EC8A. This image is then uploaded to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal, a public website. This action provides instantaneous public transparency, allowing media, civil society, and citizens worldwide to view, download, and independently tally results from polling units. It acts as a powerful bulwark against altering results during the later stages of collation.
Layer 3: Parallel Party Monitoring (The Competitive Check): With agents present at over 176,000 polling units, every major political party operates its own independent situation room. Agents instantly transmit the signed results to their headquarters, enabling parties to build their own real-time tallies. This creates a system of competitive verification where any discrepancy between a party’s tally, the IReV, and INEC’s official collation is immediately flagged.

This tripartite system ensures that for a result to be successfully manipulated, an actor would have to compromise the physically signed copies held by multiple rival parties, alter the copies in the possession of thousands of citizens, and simultaneously hack the IReV portal—a feat of logistical and cyber impossibility.

3. The Perils of Mandating Real-Time Electronic Transmission

The push for legally mandated real-time transmission, while appealing, introduces significant risks that could undermine the very credibility it seeks to ensure.

Vulnerability to Cyber Attacks: As seen in advanced democracies like the United States, electronic electoral systems are high-value targets for state and non-state actors. A system that makes instantaneous electronic transmission the primary, legally required pathway creates a single point of failure. Cybersecurity experts globally warn that software errors and targeted attacks are inevitable. Nigeria’s current model, where the electronic upload is a verification tool for a pre-existing paper record, is inherently more resilient.
Ignoring Technical and Logistical Ground Realities: A law mandating “real-time” transmission fails to account for Nigeria’s vast areas with poor or non-existent network coverage, intermittent power, and varying levels of technical proficiency among ad-hoc staff. Such a law could disenfranchise voters in remote areas by making their results legally contestable due to transmission delays caused by factors beyond INEC’s control.
Undermining the Primacy of the Polling Unit: The most sacred principle in election integrity is that the vote cast at the polling unit is sovereign. Nigeria’s system fortifies this by making the signed result sheet the primary legal document. Over-emphasising electronic transmission risks shifting public trust to a digital signal that can be interrupted or spoofed, away from the physical, community-witnessed process at the polling unit.

4. Global Context: Learning from International Best Practice

The global movement among electoral integrity experts is not toward fully electronic, real-time systems, but toward Systems with a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). Authorities from the European Commission to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) emphasise that software should never be the sole record of a vote. Nigeria’s system, with its signed EC8A form, is essentially a robust VVPAT system. The IReV upload serves as an excellent transparency mechanism, but the nation’s electoral truth is rooted in the paper, not the pixel.

Conclusion & Recommendation

The Transformative Governance Forum concludes that the architecture of Nigeria’s electoral system, as designed in the 2022 Act and affirmed in the recent amendment, is conceptually sound and robust. The outcry for change, while rooted in a desire for progress, risks exchanging a resilient, multi-layered system for one that is more technologically fragile and vulnerable to sophisticated attack.

The path forward is not a radical overhaul, but a rigorous reinforcement of the existing system:

Strengthen Implementation: Hold INEC accountable for the 100% operational functionality of BVAS and timely upload to IReV.
Enforce Existing Law: Ensure strict adherence to the signing and public posting of results at polling units, with consequences for any official or agent who obstructs this.
Build Public Literacy: Launch civic campaigns to educate voters and observers on how to use the IReV portal to verify results against the posted polling unit sheets, empowering them as active guardians of the process.

Nigeria’s electoral challenge is not primarily a deficit of law or technology, but one of consistent implementation and unwavering political will. The hybrid system provides the tools; it is for the nation’s actors to use them faithfully.

Published by the Transformative Governance Forum (TGF). TGF provides independent analysis on governance and institutional reform. This perspective is intended to contribute to informed public discourse.