The Nigerian Senate revising Clause 60(3) of the Electoral Act Amendment Bill to allow both electronic and manual transmission of results still leaves the fraud window wide open.
Development Diaries reports that the Senate on Tuesday voted ‘yes’ to the electronic transmission of election results, but only after EC8A forms have been signed and stamped.
Nigeria’s political class has a long, established tradition of giving with the right hand while drafting backdoors with the left. And in this case, the backdoor is sitting right there in the fine print.
The country’s election headache has never been only about thugs at polling units or bags of rice wrapped in party colours, as the real chaos usually begins after the results are announced at the polling unit.
That is when the infamous ‘movement’ of figures starts, including the manual transfers, the mysterious delays, the missing uploads, and the late-night alterations that suddenly transform losers into ‘winners’.
As Reuters put it bluntly, Nigeria’s collation system is still ‘largely manual and opaque’, and that opacity is where election credibility goes to die.
This keeps happening because the law keeps giving politicians the three easy escape routes of no fixed deadline for uploads, the manual fallback can be activated simply by invoking the magic phrase ‘network issues’, and the whole system lacks a verifiable audit trail, leaving citizens with pictures of results but no way to confirm whether those pictures made it into the official pipeline unaltered.
Take the Senate’s decision to remove the phrase ‘real time’. On the surface, it looks like a harmless tweak. But in a country where election disputes often begin with the question ‘what happened between the polling unit and collation’? time is not a technical detail.
Time is the entire crime scene, because If results can be uploaded hours after counting, or even the next morning, a lot can happen in that silence, as presiding officers can be pressured, narratives can be shaped, and missing uploads can be waved away with network excuses.
Supporters of the Senate amendment argue that network issues could lead to court cases if ‘real-time’ becomes a legal requirement.
That sounds reasonable until you realise the flexibility they are asking for benefits institutions, not citizens, because in Nigeria, ‘network failure’ is also a political strategy.
Then comes the second loophole of manual fallback. If a law allows thousands of polling units to skip immediate uploads due to ‘network issues’, what stops widespread abuse?
Arise TV has already warned that polling units, 176,000 of them, could easily retreat to manual collation, creating the same old opportunities for tampering.
Where then is the all-important electoral reform?
The third problem is that even if uploads eventually happen, citizens still need proof that what they see is authentic and trackable: who uploaded it, when, from what device, and what happens if two versions appear.
Now, the law does not answer these questions, and without answers, transparency is just a slogan.
Civil society groups are right to call the Senate’s approach retrogressive. What Nigeria needs is not electronic transmission by name, but electronic transmission involving timelines, verifiable logs, chain-of-custody rules, and real penalties.
And this is where responsibility comes in. The National Assembly is now the battlefield, because the harmonisation committee will decide what goes into the final bill.
INEC must define the actual transmission protocol so citizens can hold them accountable. And the presidency must decide whether it wants political theatre or actual reform.
Ordinary Nigerians bear the cost of bad elections the most, with poor communities losing influence, women candidates facing higher barriers, and youth movements losing momentum. The system becomes even more expensive and exclusionary.
So what now?
Nigerians must keep the pressure on. The moment the harmonised bill is released, we must read it, simplify it, and share it. INEC must publish a clear transmission protocol, not vague assurances.
Communities must track previous delays and use that data to demand reforms; and the presidency must be pushed to commit publicly to a version of the law that actually strengthens credibility.
At Development Diaries, our position remains that removing ‘real time’ and retaining broad manual fallback creates loopholes big enough to drive a convoy of political manipulation through. Real reform means enforceable deadlines, narrow exceptions, public audit logs, and consequences.
