EDITORIAL: Electoral Reforms: What is the Senate really afraid of?

A potential act of subversion of the public good reared its head in the Senate’s rejection of the electronic transmission of election results in real time, from polling units to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) database, during its consideration of amendments to Electoral Act 2022 last Wednesday. This was the most critical provision in the electoral reform bill placed before the National Assembly, which was arrived at through a painstaking engagement with and the consensus of stakeholders in the country.

This thus opens the window for a prospective manipulation of election results in 2027, that will constitute a subversion of the sovereign will of the people, and the certainty of widespread post-election litigations, which bodes ill for our democracy.

Yet, media reports indicate that a majority of senators voted to keep the electronic transmission in the amended bill, but which was rejected by the Senate leadership due to reason many find spurious and highly untenable, including the need to forestall a climate of electoral dissension and litigation. Opposition political parties in Senate, led by Enyinnaya Abaribe, at a press briefing, said that even the report of the ad hoc committee contained the real time electronic transmission of results. This was confimed by one of its members, Abdul Ningi. Another member, Aminu Tambuwal, was at the briefing of the members of opposition parties.

The House of Representatives had passed its own version of the bill in December 2025, which differs markedly from that of the Senate; a development that now requires an harmonisation of the two versions for the onward transmission of a single bill to the President for assent.

We urge the House to insist on its version – embodying the will of the people and aggregate view of various stakeholders – as that to be forwarded to the President.

It was not surprising, therefore, that public outcry greeted the version of the bill passed by the Senate, especially from stakeholders, including opposition political parties and civil society organisations, which had vigorously pushed for the provision on the electronic transmission of results to enhance transparency and the integrity of Nigeria’s electoral processes and outcomes. One of the stakeholders described the Senate act as a “deliberate assault on electoral transparency.”

Section 60 (3) of the Electoral Act 2022, which the Senate retains in its version, states that, “The electoral officer shall transfer the results, including the number of accredited voters and the results of the ballot in a manner as prescribed by the Commission.” This had led to the huge denunciation of the 2023 polls as a perversion of the public will, typified in the reported “technical glitch” that subverted the real-time transmission of results, making the outcome of the presidential poll highly contested and rejected in many quarters.

Nigeria’s electoral antecedents often reveal that results are altered at collation centres. This monstrosity is what the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) real time electronic transmission to its IReV Portal seeks to cure. No applause to the senators for not being comfortable with this attempt at crucial reform.

The amended Electoral Act – which is yet to be ready – would provide the legal framework for the conduct of the 2027 general elections. INEC chairman, Joash Amupitan, had last Wednesday decried the National Assembly’s delay in creating an enabling environment for the commission’s work – which has already been badly affected.

The first casualty of the lawmakers’ indecisiveness is INEC’s 360 days’ Notice of Election, which has been reduced to 180 days. This is irreversible due to time constraints.

Nigerians should resist the Senate’s non-altruistic embrace of ambiguities or loopholes in the version of the electoral law or guidelines it seeks to peddle, which preserves the status quo and is inimical to democratic consolidation in the country. In it, rather than endorse the proposed 10-year jail term penalty for vote-buying and selling initially proposed, it retained the two years in the old Act of 2022.

The Red Chamber’s subterfuge gradually became evident penultimate week when the seven-member ad hoc panel, chaired by Adeniyi Adegbonmire, constituted to examine the report of its Standing Committee on Electoral Matters and gather inputs and aggregate the opinions of senators, submitted its report last Tuesday. Instead of an open consideration of the latter report, as Senate President Godswill Akpabio had earlier promised, the senators went into a closed-door session for this.

In retrospect, the House of Representatives had passed the electoral reform bill in December 2025 and forwarded to the Senate for concurrence. But the House curiously returned to it for further deliberations, before it embarked on a two-week recess. The provisions of its passed bill were drafted to cure the controversies that the electronic transmission of results from polling units to the IReV in real time generated in the last election.

The Supreme Court had, in its post-election judgment of 2023, declared that the IReV Portal is not part of the collation system, if not entrenched in the Electoral Act. Besides, the adoption of the electronic transmission ofresults is to be expressly stipulated in the law also.

If these guardrails are not ulttimately codified in the amended electoral law, the Senate would have jettisoned clarity for opacity, and enabled the wiles of anti-democratic forces and opportunism at the expense of the national interest.

The Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room had held a protest in Abuja two weeks ago to pressure the Senate to do the needful. “The protest is not merely about one bill…it is about whether Nigeria’s democratic institutions can act with foresight and responsibility, rather than waiting until the eve of elections to scramble for reforms,” the group stated.

Other crucial provisions of the Electoral Act include, but are not limited to the following: the imposition of stiffer penalties for vote-buying, which would now attract between ₦2 million and ₦5 million in fines or a 10-year jail term; and the fining of presiding officers who fail to stamp and sign the results they announce. Also, all the parties are required to submit electronic copies of their membership registers to INEC before conducting primaries to select candidates.

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This would make it impossible for losers in one party primary to defect to other parties to pick or snatch tickets, which led to the high number of candidate substitutions and the resultant pre-election litigations following the 2023 elections.

At this point, PREMIUM TIMES makes bold to remind Mr Akpabio and his colleagues in the Senate of the wise counsel of a former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, on democratic consolidation that: “The electoral process (must) be undergirded by two fundamental standards: credibility and integrity.”

This consciousness had underpinned the policy steps taken in the US after its presidential election of 2000, when electoral fraud in the State of Florida was flagged and investigated. Governor Jeb Bush thereafter signed the Florida Election Reform Act, 2001 into law, while federal reform bills were equally passed in both the House of Representatives and Senate to address the concerns that arose.

Elections have been held in Nigeria in which ballot papers were not serialised or numbered; or stamped and signed by presiding officers; and voters out-numbered those accredited to vote. Yet, INEC and the courts took their turns in declaring winners, which denied the electorates their rights of making such calls. The public trust deficits arising thereof are still very much with us. These ought to have informed the making of unambiguous laws to return trust to our electoral processes, which the Senate appears bent on not doing, with its present attempt to subvert the popular will.

So far, the parliament since 1999 has altered Nigeria’s electoral law five times, which were subsequently sabotaged by politicians and INEC, necessitating the need for continuous reforms to the enabling legislation guidding elections in the country. In very clear terms, the resolution to the present quandary demands that the country makes a clean break with its odious past.