Election results management remains the most contested and consequential phase of Nigeria’s electoral process. It is the point at which votes cast by citizens are translated into electoral outcomes. It is here that the inconceivable becomes routine: results are altered, substituted, or manufactured outright; officials are compromised; and security agencies, shedding the garb of neutrality, interfere with collation to engineer a preferred outcome, mostly to protect a regime or oust an incumbent. This is the stage at which the integrity, independence and resilience of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) face their most severe test.
One opportunity to strengthen confidence was the reform of the Electoral Act in 2026. Although the Act makes electronic transmission of polling-unit results to the IREV portal mandatory, the proviso allowing the physical result sheet to override the results transmitted electronically makes the result management process vulnerable to manipulation, and it defeats the entire purpose of electronic transmission. This is of utmost concern because evidence shows the physical result sheet is the classic instrument of manipulation. Where a result has been altered on paper, it is the altered figure that governs collation even when the image on the IReV is the accurate reflection of what transpired at the polling unit. Whatever its stated rationale, the proviso provides legal protection for the very manipulation that electronic transmission was designed to prevent.
|
|
In its policy brief, Securing the Vote: Electronic Transmission and Collation of Election Results, Yiaga Africa examined the legal and procedural framework that will govern the 2027 elections. One conclusion is particularly important: some of the processes most likely to shape public confidence in election results remain insufficiently visible to the citizens they are designed to reassure. The good news is that many of these weaknesses can be addressed administratively. INEC does not have to wait for another amendment to the Electoral Act. It can act now.
Here are seven steps INEC should take to rebuild trust in election results:
|
|
|
|---|
First, INEC needs to publish a comprehensive results transmission protocol. Nigerians are entitled to know, in plain language, the full journey of an election result. INEC should publish, in clear and accessible language, the complete journey of a polling-unit result from declaration at the polling unit to its appearance on the IReV portal. At present, an important part of that journey remains opaque: the internal or “backend” process through which electronically transmitted results pass before they become publicly visible. The purpose of this process, who performs it, what constitutes validation, what actions can be taken on a transmitted result and how long the process should take have not been sufficiently explained to the public.
This opacity creates what, in technology governance, is effectively a black-box problem: citizens can observe the input and the eventual output but cannot adequately understand what happens in between. In an environment already characterized by low trust, unexplained processes inevitably generate suspicion, misinformation and political narratives. The pattern of IReV uploads makes this issue even more important. During the recent Ekiti election, Yiaga Africa’s Election Results Analysis Dashboard (ERAD), which monitored uploads to IReV, recorded the first results on the portal at 4:10pm By 4:14pm., 283 results had appeared. Later, 748 results appeared within approximately five minutes, between 6:32pm and 6:37pm.
There may be perfectly legitimate technical explanations for such upload patterns. But that is precisely why INEC should explain the architecture. In election administration, unexplained system behavior creates an information vacuum, and information vacuums are quickly filled by suspicion, misinformation and political narratives. INEC should also explain the newly introduced electronic EC8A process. Polling officials are now required to enter figures from the physical result sheet into an electronic version on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). Nigerians deserve clarity on the function of this electronic record, where it is transmitted, how it is stored, whether it is used for reconciliation or validation, and what happens when it conflicts with the physical EC8A or its scanned image.
Second, publish polling unit accreditation figures on the IREV. INEC should publish BVAS accreditation figures for every polling unit alongside the corresponding polling-unit result on IReV. Before the 2023 general election, INEC promised to publish accreditation figures for polling units on the IReV; the promise was never fully kept. Ahead of 2027, it should be a critical component of the results management process. Accreditation data is one of the most important integrity controls in an election because the number of votes recorded at a polling unit should be capable of being reconciled against the number of voters accredited to vote. Publishing the BVAS accreditation figure alongside Form EC8A would create an additional layer of public auditability. Citizens, political parties, observers and journalists would be able to conduct basic consistency checks between accreditation data and declared results.
Third, publish the ward and local government collation sheets on the IREV. Forms EC8B and EC8C should be published on the IREV portal, and the Commission should set a firm date for doing so. Today the portal shows the polling unit result but not the collated results at the ward and local government levels, which is where, election after election, results have quietly changed. It is important for citizens to follow the journey of results as a confidence building measure. For instance, where cancellations are made at the ward collation, the public can’t keep track of those cancellations including the justification for the cancellation. The public ought to know to be able to trust the results declared.
At present, citizens can view polling-unit result sheets but cannot follow the same result through the subsequent stages of the collation chain. This creates a significant transparency gap because collation is not merely an arithmetic exercise. It is also the stage at which cancellations, corrections and other decisions affecting final totals may occur.
Fourth, establish a clear hierarchy and reconciliation protocol for election records. The new results-management framework creates the possibility of multiple versions of the same polling-unit result: the signed physical EC8A, the scanned image uploaded to IReV and the electronically transmitted result. INEC must clearly state what happens when there is a discrepancy in the results. What is required is a formal reconciliation protocol setting out how discrepancies are identified, documented, investigated and resolved before collation proceeds.
Fifth, redraft Paragraph 40 of its Regulations and Guidelines. INEC should remove the ambiguities in Paragraph 40 of its Regulations and Guidelines before the general election. Two issues require particular attention. First, the Regulations should state expressly where the validated polling-unit result referred to under Paragraph 40(i) is transmitted and what operational purpose that transmission serves. Second, INEC should establish a clear protocol for documenting instances of communication failure. “Communication failure” cannot become an elastic expression invoked whenever electronic transmission does not occur. Because failure of electronic transmission can have significant consequences for results management, every such incident should generate a verifiable record.
The Regulations should prescribe a standard incident form capturing, at a minimum, the polling unit concerned, the time the failure occurred, the nature of the failure, the connectivity or technical conditions encountered, the steps taken by the Presiding Officer, whether transmission was retried, when transmission was eventually completed and the officials who certified the incident.
Sixth, open the technology to independent scrutiny. Public confidence in election technology cannot rest solely on assurances from the institution that procured and operates it. INEC should subject the upgraded accreditation, transmission and results-management systems to independent technical assessment before the 2027 elections. The systems should also undergo penetration and stress test including a public mock exercise as already promised by INEC. Such an exercise should reflect the scale, diversity and operational conditions of a general election.
INEC should also disclose, to the extent compatible with system security, what technological upgrades were procured, the objectives of those upgrades, the standards against which they were tested and the broad outcomes of those tests. A system may be technically sound and still fail the test of public confidence if nobody outside the institution can independently validate that claim.
Seventh, gazette the Regulations and Guidelines. INEC should formally gazette its Regulations and Guidelines in accordance with the law and issue a dedicated results-management manual for election officials. Every official involved in the results chain – from Presiding Officers and Registration Area Technical Support personnel to Collation Officers and Returning Officers should understand the procedures governing electronic transmission, communication failure, discrepancy resolution, result cancellation, collation and documentation.
Transparency is the price of trust
What these seven measures have in common is as important as the measures themselves. None requires another amendment to the Electoral Act. None depends principally on the courts or the National Assembly. They are largely within INEC’s regulatory, administrative and operational authority.
What they require is a willingness to subject the results management process to greater public scrutiny. That scrutiny may be uncomfortable, but it is the price of trust. Citizens are more likely to trust a result when they can follow the journey of election results. With the 2027 elections approaching, the responsibility rests squarely with INEC to make that chain visible, predictable and auditable. Political parties and other stakeholders also have responsibilities. Political parties must take results oversight seriously. They should understand the legal and regulatory framework, interrogate ambiguities and invest in the recruitment, training and deployment of competent party agents to polling units and collation centres.
Election observation groups should sustain independent verification mechanisms, including parallel tabulation methodologies where appropriate, systematic monitoring of IReV uploads and scrutiny of the entire collation chain. The media must similarly move beyond reporting only the drama of state-level collation and declaration. Journalists should track how results move from polling units through every stage of collation, interrogate discrepancies and explain the process to citizens.
Samson Itodo is an election, democracy, and public policy enthusiast. Itodo serves as the executive director of Yiaga Africa, principal partner of the Election Law Center and chairperson of the African Union Advisory Group on AI in Peace, Security and Governance. He is also a member of the Kofi Annan Foundation board and the Board of Advisers of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA).
Discover more from Premium Times Nigeria
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
