Civil Society, Labour Leaders Reject Senate Amendment To Electoral Act, Call For Review

The Movement for Credible Elections (MCE), alongside leaders of organised civil society and the labour movement, has rejected the Senate’s amendment to Section 60(3) of the Electoral Act 2022 and called for an urgent review.

The amendment mandates electronic transmission of results to the IReV portal but permits a fallback to manual collation where electronic transmission is claimed to have failed due to network issues.

In a statement on Wednesday, the coalition expressed concern that the provision allowing manual collation under claims of connectivity problems could affect the integrity of the process.

Warning about the ease of invoking connectivity challenges, the group stated, “In the Nigerian context, this proviso is dangerous. Claims of ‘ network failure ’ are easy to make, difficult to verify in real time, and have historically been used to justify result substitution and other irregularities.”

Referring to previous electoral experience, the coalition cited the 2023 elections, stating, “The ‘technical glitch’ called by INEC in 2023 is still too fresh and a wound to be forgotten.”

Addressing the issue of manual collation, the group described it as a weak stage in the process, stating, “Manual collation remains the most compromised stage of the electoral process and it’s the very problem electronic transmission was designed to eliminate.”

Clarifying its position on technological concerns, the coalition said transmission delays should not be equated with system failure, stating, “It is important therefore to clarify that real-time transmission challenges are not BVAS system failures but network relativity issues.”

Explaining how the system operates, the statement added, “BVAS operates on secure cloud-computing protocols, meaning results captured and queued for transmission remain preserved and should not be invalidated by temporary connectivity challenges.”

The group therefore formally rejected the amendment and called for legislative reconsideration, stating, “We therefore reject the amendment as currently framed and call for a review that ensures electronic transmission remains mandatory, decisive, and superior to manual processes in all circumstances.”