White Paper
Executive Summary
Nigeria's 2027 general elections will be the most consequential electoral test since the country's return to civilian rule in 1999. The election will be conducted under a newly enacted Electoral Act 2026, administered by a new Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman - Professor Joash Amupitan, sworn into office in October 2025 and against a backdrop of deep public scepticism following the disputed 2023 general elections.
The central question before decision-makers in government, civil society, and the Nigerian electorate is not simply whether INEC has enough technology. It is whether the institutional, legal, and political conditions exist to make the technology credible.
This policy paper traces the 25-year trajectory of electronic innovation in Nigeria's electoral system from the manual, fraud-prone registers of 1999 to the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) in 2023 and argues that the country has consistently experienced what it terms a 'trust paradox': technology designed to build public confidence has, at critical moments, deepened disillusionment.
Biometric accreditation technologies have demonstrably reduced polling-unit fraud. But the persistent failure to ensure transparent result transmission, most acutely exposed in the 2023 presidential election, when IReV did not deliver real-time results as publicly promised, shifted the site of electoral manipulation from the polling unit to the collation centres.
The Electoral Act 2026, signed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on 18 February 2026, represents the most consequential legislative response to this crisis. For the first time, BVAS and IReV carry statutory force. Electronic transmission of results is now mandatory, and Presiding Officers who obstruct it face criminal penalties. Yet the Act contains a significant loophole: a “communication failure” proviso allows manual Form EC8A to substitute for electronic transmission in undefined circumstances.
Civil society organisations and legal analysts have warned that this exception, if invoked selectively, could reproduce the very opacity that the IReV was designed to eliminate.
The paper makes seven core policy recommendations, directed at INEC, the National Assembly, and civil society. These include mandatory pre-election mock transmission tests; independent third-party audits of INEC's technology infrastructure; legislative clarification of the 'communication failure' clause; the establishment of an Electoral Offences Commission; and the strengthening of technical observation capacity within civil society.
Technology is necessary for electoral credibility in Nigeria, but it is not sufficient. The 2027 elections will be decided not by which devices are deployed, but by the institutional will to deploy them honestly.
Download the white paper here
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Christopher Ebikebena
Analyst, Governance & Political Institutions