…the Osun experience reaffirmed the value of electronic transmission and real-time public access to polling unit results as safeguards against manipulation and as mechanisms for strengthening transparency, auditability and citizen oversight. After the crisis of confidence that followed the 2023 general election, IReV appears to be reclaiming its place as a consequential game changer in Nigeria’s electoral architecture.
For much of Nigeria’s electoral history, the most dangerous journey in an election begins after the voter casts the ballot. Ballots may be counted and result sheets signed openly at the polling unit in the presence of voters and party agents, but the physical movement of results through ward, local government and state collation centres has historically created vulnerabilities to alteration, substitution, mutilation and outright fabrication. Judicial records and successive national electoral reform interventions like the Babalakin Commission of Inquiry into the affairs of the Federal Electoral Commission (1986), the Uwais Electoral Reform Committee (2008) and the Nnamani Committee on Constitution and Electoral Reform (2017) converge on a single diagnosis: election results manipulation has been embedded in the pathology of Nigeria’s electoral politics. The enduring challenge, therefore, has been how to protect the integrity of polling unit results throughout their journey to final declaration.
The INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) was conceived as solution to the perennial case of election results manipulation. The promise of this innovative technological tool was simple but equally transformative: make the polling unit result visible to the public to deter manipulation, substitution and manufacture of fake results during collation at the ward, local government and state levels. Under the system, polling officials use the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) to capture images of completed polling unit result sheets and transmit them to IReV, creating a publicly accessible record against which subsequent collation can be scrutinised.
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Between 2022 and the 2023 general election, IReV earned its reputation as an electoral game changer. Beyond making polling unit results publicly accessible, the platform introduced an additional layer of transparency and auditability into the results management process, thereby constraining opportunities for compromised election officials to alter results during collation. IReV also strengthened INEC’s institutional capacity to resist political pressure aimed at manipulating or suppressing results. The 2023 general election, however, marked a significant rupture in this trajectory. The failure to upload presidential polling unit results as expected became one of the defining controversies of the election, severely damaging public confidence in a technology that had come to symbolise transparency and integrity in results management.
The 2026 Osun governorship election, however, presents a different story. IReV was not without operational shortcomings, and important questions remain regarding the transmission protocols, BVAS operating system, data synchronisation, system resilience, etc. Nevertheless, the Osun experience reaffirmed the value of electronic transmission and real-time public access to polling unit results as safeguards against manipulation and as mechanisms for strengthening transparency, auditability and citizen oversight. After the crisis of confidence that followed the 2023 general election, IReV appears to be reclaiming its place as a consequential game changer in Nigeria’s electoral architecture.
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What has happened since 2023 is a gradual legal and operational reform. The most consequential change is amendment to Section 60(3) of the Electoral Act 2026 gives legal recognition to the IReV and makes electronic transmission of results compulsory. The operational reform included INEC’s introduction of the electronic EC8A (e-EC8A) on the BVAS through its Regulations and Guidelines. Under the process, polling officials first use the BVAS to capture an image of the physical Form EC8A before entering the results into its electronic version.
IReV: From Experiment to Electoral Integrity Infrastructure
IReV did not emerge from nowhere. It was INEC’s innovation aimed at leveraging technology to reduce human interference in results management. After the 2011 general election, INEC tried to transmit results by SMS and abandoned the experiment when the number of political parties made it impracticable and the error rate was too high. It tried e-Track, using handheld scanners to convert polling unit results into PDFs and found that many results were never scanned and many scans were illegible. What survived was a narrower, more disciplined idea: transmit state-level presidential results to Abuja through a secure channel ahead of the physical forms, so the numbers could be cross-checked in public view. That practice, adopted in 2011, became the Collation Support and Result Verification System (CSRVS), and eventually IReV.
The IReV portal was officially deployed during the Nasarawa Central State Constituency by-election on 8 August 2020, alongside the use of Z-Pad tablets. Although the Z-Pad was subsequently discontinued because of technical challenges, the election marked an important turning point: for the first time, citizens could remotely access polling unit results through a public platform. INEC describes uploaded result sheets as time-stamped and tamper-resistant, creating a digital audit trail accessible to political parties, observers, journalists and citizens.
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The Nasarawa experiment also underscored the need for a more sophisticated and integrated device capable of supporting both biometric voter accreditation and electronic results management. This evolution eventually produced the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), integrating fingerprint and facial authentication with the capacity to capture and transmit polling-unit results to IReV. In this sense, IReV’s evolution was incremental: from an experimental transparency tool to an increasingly integrated component of Nigeria’s electoral integrity infrastructure.
The innovation was rapidly expanded. By 2021, INEC reported that polling unit result images had been transmitted from elections across 20 states and the FCT, covering 83 local government areas, 920 wards and 14,212 polling units. IReV subsequently became an integral feature of INEC’s results management framework. INEC understood exactly why this mattered. Its 2021 position paper on electronic transmission identified the vulnerability of the result management process as structural: a predominantly manual results management system in which officials completed result sheets and physically moved them through successive layers of collation, creating opportunities for the records to be altered, stolen, mutilated or destroyed. The Commission itself described one manifestation of this vulnerability as “result jacking.” IReV was therefore not simply a technological upgrade; it was designed as an integrity safeguard against a longstanding vulnerability in Nigeria’s results management chain.
Undoubtedly, IReV reclaimed its game-changer status in Osun because law, technology and citizen oversight converged: the Electoral Act 2026 strengthened its legal foundation, citizens used it to scrutinise results, and independent verification reinforced its credibility. Remove any of these pillars and IReV risks becoming merely a website. In 2027, it must prove that the game has permanently changed.
The Long Rebuild
What has happened since 2023 is a gradual legal and operational reform. The most consequential change is amendment to Section 60(3) of the Electoral Act 2026 gives legal recognition to the IReV and makes electronic transmission of results compulsory. The operational reform included INEC’s introduction of the electronic EC8A (e-EC8A) on the BVAS through its Regulations and Guidelines. Under the process, polling officials first use the BVAS to capture an image of the physical Form EC8A before entering the results into its electronic version. The polling official must then confirm that the figures entered electronically correspond with those on the physical result sheet. Where the figures do not tally, the BVAS rejects the entry and prevents transmission. According to INEC, this validation mechanism is designed to prevent the transmission of result sheets containing discrepancies or data-entry errors.
Independent Verification Strengthened the Credibility of the Election Result
The Osun election demonstrated the value of combining electronic transmission with independent verification. Citizens and multiple monitoring platforms could track, aggregate and analyse polling-unit results in near real time. Yiaga Africa’s Election Results Analysis Dashboard (ERAD) 2.0 deployed in partnership with Channels Television and supported by the European Union provided systematic scrutiny of results published on IReV, reinforcing the transparency and auditability of the results management process. ERAD 2.0 found that while IReV remained accessible, results publication experienced delays. The first 41 results appeared around 3:40 p.m. – 3:48 p.m., nearly 1 hour 40 minutes after the expected close of voting. ERAD findings also show that some upload attempts were unsuccessful because the electronic EC8A validation mechanism detected discrepancies.
A notable period of stagnation later occurred when uploads remained at 3,292 results between 8:48 p.m. and 11:50 p.m., leaving 471 outstanding, before transmission resumed around 11:50 p.m. By 8:36 a.m., the following morning, 3,701 results had been published, representing 98.35 per cent completion. The experience demonstrates both the value of independent verification and the need for greater resilience, timeliness and transparency in IReV operations. However, an unexplained silence during the most sensitive phase of results management risks reproducing the crisis of confidence associated with the 2023 general election. That uploads eventually resumed without evidence of material alteration does not make the silence acceptable. If IReV is to function as a trust infrastructure, delays or interruptions must be matched with prompt public communication.
The Bigger Lesson: Transparency Changes behaviour
Perhaps IReV’s most consequential contribution is behavioural, not technological: transparency changes incentives. When election officials know that polling unit results will become publicly visible, the cost of altering them during collation increases; when political actors know that independent verification platforms such as ERAD 2.0, reinforced by real-time televised analysis, can independently reconstruct and scrutinise results, the space for pressure and manipulation narrows; and when citizens can follow their votes from polling units through collation, results management becomes less susceptible to manipulation. The real test will come in 2027, when the IREV must operate nationwide under far greater political, technological and operational pressure. Undoubtedly, IReV reclaimed its game-changer status in Osun because law, technology and citizen oversight converged: the Electoral Act 2026 strengthened its legal foundation, citizens used it to scrutinise results, and independent verification reinforced its credibility. Remove any of these pillars and IReV risks becoming merely a website. In 2027, it must prove that the game has permanently changed.
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).
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