Former senior officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) have raised fresh concerns over ambiguities in the newly enacted Electoral Act 2026.

They warned that conflicting provisions on electronic transmission of results could undermine electoral integrity if not urgently addressed.

The concerns were raised on Friday in Abuja at a Yiaga Africa roundtable discussion themed “Electronic Transmission and Electoral Integrity: Safeguarding the Vote under the Electoral Act 2026.”

The ex-officials who spoke at the event include former National Commissioner, Festus Okoye, former Resident Electoral Commissioner Mike Igini, former ICT Director Engr. Chidi Nwafor, and civil society leaders.

President Bola Tinubu recently signed the Electoral Act 2026 (Amendment) into law despite opposition from Civil Society Groups who have long pushed for real-time transmission of results from polling units to INEC’s central server, arguing it would curb manipulation and strengthen credibility.

Speaking, Okoye who was chairman of the Information and Voter Education Committee of the commission, said while the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) remains a very good and innovative device, the 2026 Act contains drafting inconsistencies that could create confusion in implementation.

He recalled that the Smart Card Reader was initially introduced through INEC guidelines but was not expressly recognised in the Electoral Act until the 2022 amendment.

According to him, the National Assembly has now replaced references to the Smart Card Reader with BVAS in some sections of the 2026 Act but failed to make the substitution uniformly across the law.

Okoye cautioned lawmakers against embedding specific technological names in statutes, arguing that technology evolves rapidly.

He said: “Where BVAS appears in the principal section, Smart Card Reader is still retained in other parts of the Act. The National Assembly needs to clean up the drafting to avoid ambiguity

“Don’t write a particular technology into the law. Allow the electoral body discretion to adopt appropriate technology at any given time. Each time technology changes, you cannot keep amending the Act”.

He explained that BVAS was designed as a multifunctional platform capable of voter registration, biometric accreditation, result upload and even future electronic voting if activated.

He, however, noted that while the device has the capacity for full electronic transmission of results, that function has not been fully operationalised.

A major highlight of the discussion was Section 60 of the 2026 Act, which mandates electronic transmission of polling unit results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV), but includes a proviso that Form EC8A, the manually completed result sheet remains the primary source of collation and declaration.

Okoye argued that a careful reading of Sections 60 and 65 reveals two separate transmissions; one to IReV for public viewing and another to the collation system.

He cited Section 155, which defines “transmit” as sending manually or electronically, suggesting that the law provides room for both methods.

Okoye maintained that where discrepancies arise, electronically transmitted results to the collation system should carry greater weight if interpreted creatively and strategically.

“I am not factoring IReV into the equation of collation because the Supreme Court has defined it as a viewing portal. But the law also provides for transmission to the next level of collation, and we must interrogate that carefully,” he said.

Former INEC ICT Director, Engr. Chidi Nwafor, traced Nigeria’s technological electoral reforms to early digitised voter registration efforts in 2003 and the eventual introduction of biometric systems under former INEC Chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega. (The Guardian)

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