The Southerner —OPEN EYES
Thursday, February 12, 2026
Nigeria’s democracy stands at an unprecedented juncture as the nation approaches the 2027 general elections, with the debates and yearnings over real-time electronic transmission of electoral results emerging as perhaps the most consequential aspect of ongoing electoral reforms.
The 2023 general elections exposed fundamental weaknesses in Nigeria’s electoral infrastructure, with widespread allegations of result manipulation, unexplained delays in collation, and incidents where results announced at polling units bore little resemblance to those finally declared at collation centers. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) introduced the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for voter accreditation, yet inexplicably failed to fully utilize its capacity for immediate electronic transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
This technological half-measure, accrediting voters electronically while reverting to manual transmission of results created the very loopholes that undermined public confidence. For Nigeria’s democracy to mature beyond its current fragile state, real-time electronic transmission must become mandatory, not optional, creating an unbroken digital chain from polling unit to final declaration that closes the windows of opportunity for electoral fraud.
The evidence supporting electronic transmission’s efficacy comes not merely from theoretical arguments but from concrete successes within Nigeria itself and across the African continent. During the 2020 Edo State gubernatorial election, where INEC more consistently uploaded results to IReV, the transparency dramatically reduced post-election disputes and enhanced acceptance of results by losing candidates. Similarly, the 2021 Anambra governorship election saw relatively smoother processes where electronic systems functioned properly. Internationally, Kenya’s 2022 general elections demonstrated how electronic transmission, despite initial technical challenges, provided a verifiable trail that allowed the Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes based on data rather than mere allegations.
More recently, Ghana successfully conducted elections using electronic transmission systems (with the support of Nigeria’s INEC) that significantly reduced result manipulation. With all these proven sucesses, one would wonder who is afraid of real-time transmission of electoral results in Nigeria?
The pattern is unmistakable; where technology successfully captures and transmits results in real-time, electoral credibility improves, violence decreases, and democratic consolidation advances.
The current manual system of collating results creates multiple intervention points where results can be altered, often with devastating consequences for Nigeria’s democratic legitimacy.
Results recorded at polling units are transferred to ward collation centers, then to local government collation centers, then to state collation centers, and finally to national collation centers, each transfer representing an opportunity for manipulation. The 2023 presidential election was marred by numerous documented cases where results uploaded to IReV from polling units differed significantly from those announced at higher collation levels, yet INEC’s procedures gave supremacy to manually collated figures over the electronic evidence.
In Lagos, Rivers, Kogi and several northern states, civil society observers documented instances where Returning Officers announced results that contradicted the BVAS uploads, with INEC offering no satisfactory explanations for these discrepancies. The confusion and anger generated by these irregularities fueled post-election litigation that kept Nigeria’s political class embroiled in legal battles for months, distracting elected officials from governance and undermining the winner’s mandate.
By contrast, real-time electronic transmission would create an immutable record at the point of vote counting at each polling unit, the moment of maximum transparency when party agents, observers, and voters are present, making subsequent alteration technically impossible and easily detectable, thereby eliminating the “dark zones” where electoral fraud currently thrives.
Beyond preventing fraud, electronic transmission addresses the logistical nightmares and security risks inherrent in Nigeria’s current system, challenges that disproportionately affect rural and volatile areas. Transporting physical result sheets across Nigeria’s vast geography, from remote riverine communities in the Niger Delta, through insurgency-affected areas in the Northeast, to banditry-prone zones in the Northwest and North-Central, exposes electoral materials and personnel to robbery, violence, and destruction.
During the 2023 elections, several collation officers were attacked, and result sheets were stolen or destroyed in transit, leading to cancelled results and supplementary elections that cost additional resources and further delayed final outcomes.
In areas like Zamfara, Kaduna, and parts of Borno, transporting results required military escorts due to security threats, yet attacks still occur. Electronic transmission eliminates these physical vulnerabilities entirely; results uploaded directly from polling units via mobile networks or satellite connectivity bypass dangerous roads and reduce the window for violent interference. INEC’s argument that network coverage remains inadequate in some areas is increasingly untenable given Nigeria’s expanding telecommunications infrastructure and the availability of alternative connectivity solutions including satellite internet systems like Starlink, which now operates in Nigeria.
Moreover, the relatively small data size of result sheets, essentially numerical data and a few images, requires minimal bandwidth, making transmission feasible even with basic 2G connectivity, which covers over 90% of Nigeria’s polling units according to the Nigerian Communications Commission.
Let it be known, that the enhancement of public trust through transparency represents perhaps the most compelling argument for electronic transmission, addressing the profound legitimacy crisis plaguing Nigerian elections. When citizens, party agents, journalists, and civil society can view results as they are uploaded in real-time, comparing these against manually announced figures, the electoral process becomes self-auditing and resistant to wholesale manipulation.
The 2023 experience demonstrated this powerfully; in areas where results appeared promptly on IReV, public confidence remained relatively high even when preferred candidates lost, because the transparency allowed verification.
Conversely, the delays, technical “glitches,” and discrepancies between IReV uploads and official announcements triggered nationwide protests, court challenges, and a corrosion of trust that persists today.
Opinion polls conducted by my good friend and mentor, Hon. Abdul S. Oroh, Ph.D, OON, in his Electoral Management and Adjudication Thesis (2025), showed that over 70% of Nigerians support electronic transmission of results, viewing it as essential for credible elections. International observers including the European Union Election Observation Mission, the Commonwealth, and the International Republican Institute all recommended strengthening electronic transmission in their post-2023 election reports.
This overwhelming consensus, across partisan lines, regions, and demographics, reflects Nigerians’ exhaustion with an electoral system where outcomes often seem predetermined regardless of actual votes cast. Real-time electronic transmission offers a pathway to restore faith in democracy by making the journey from vote to victory transparent and verifiable at every stage.
No doubt, implementation challenges are abound, yet, they are neither insurmountable nor sufficient justification for maintaining the status quo given Nigeria’s technological capacity and the stakes involved. Critics point to network failures during the 2023 elections when BVAS machines struggled with connectivity, but these problems stemmed largely from inadequate preparation, insufficient backup systems, and last-minute technical changes rather than fundamental technological impossibility.
INEC operates on an annual budget exceeding ₦305 billion ($400 million), resources more than adequate to procure robust transmission infrastructure if deployed efficiently. The commission could partner with multiple telecommunications providers to ensure redundancy, deploy portable satellite terminals for areas with weak coverage, establish result transmission as the absolute priority for bandwidth allocation on election day, and conduct thorough advance testing in every polling unit.
Furthermore, the cost argument favours electronic transmission when considering the enormous expense of supplementary elections, prolonged litigation, post-election violence, and the broader economic impact of political uncertainty. The 2023 election cycle cost Nigeria an estimated ₦500 billion when including security deployments, violence-related destruction, and business disruptions, far exceeding what comprehensive electronic infrastructure would require.
Technical challenges demand solutions, not surrender; they require political will, adequate funding, genuine preparation, and accountability for failure, not retreat to demonstrably inferior manual systems.
This writer would propose caveats of jail terms for failure of INEC officials to conduct a free, credible and transparent elections in 2027, and outright ban on Network providers whose band disrupts the seamless transmission of electronic transmission of electoral results in the upcoming General elections.
The choice regarding electronic transmission of results represents more than a technical decision about electoral administration, it is fundamentally a question about the kind of democracy Nigerians desire and deserve. The current system, characterised by opacity, manipulation opportunities, and broken public trust, cannot sustain a stable democratic future for Africa’s most populous nation.
Every election cycle conducted without mandatory real-time electronic transmission deepens cynicism, encourages violence, and reinforces the perception that power in Nigeria is seized rather than earned through popular will. The technology exists, the public demands it, international best practices support it, and Nigeria’s own partial successes home and abroad prove its viability.
What remains absent is the political courage to fully embrace transparency, which necessarily means political elites accepting systems they cannot manipulate and outcomes they cannot predetermine.
It is imperative that the National Assembly takes the bull by the horns to amending the Electoral Act and make real-time electronic transmission mandatory and legally supreme over manual collation.
The upcoming 2027 elections represent an opportunity for Nigeria to demonstrate that its democracy can evolve, learn from past failures, and adopt systems worthy of its citizens’ trust. Electronic transmission of results is not a silver bullet that will solve all of Nigeria’s electoral challenges, but it is an indispensable foundation upon which credible, peaceful, and legitimate elections can be built, and without which Nigeria’s democratic experiment remains perpetually vulnerable to the manipulations that have plagued it since independence. May Nigeria succeed!
