Mustapha Lecky, a former national commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), says Nigeria is not technically prepared for mandatory real-time electronic transmission of election results.
Speaking on Politics Today, a Channels Television programme,
Lecky said the current push for instantaneous uploads from polling units is
misplaced because Nigeria still conducts manual voting with paper ballots
rather than electronic voting.
“It doesn’t really make sense to me that we should be
talking about instantaneous transmission of results live as it is happening
from the polling area,” Lecky said on Friday.
“We don’t do electronic voting anywhere. Are we doing
electronic voting? We are very far away from it.”
He said results must first be manually counted and verified
at polling units in the presence of party agents before any upload can occur,
with the EC8A form — signed by agents — serving as the critical document.
Lecky said the existing framework, including INEC’s result
viewing portal (IReV) and the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS),
already provides sufficient transparency if properly implemented.
He said Nigeria lacks the nationwide infrastructure —
particularly reliable mobile network coverage in many rural polling units — to
support real-time electronic transmission without risking failures or cyber
vulnerabilities.
“For electronic transmission, we are not ready. We are not
technically ready,” he said, warning that forcing the system without adequate
preparation could expose the electoral process to greater risks in a country
with limited digital resilience.
Lecky urged INEC to focus on perfecting existing tools,
adding that even more established democracies still face challenges with
technology.
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