A former National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Mustapha Lecky, has explained why Nigeria is not ready for the electronic transmission of electoral results.
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Lecky, who spoke during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Friday, called for adequate preparation that could boost the nation’s electoral process.
“For electronic transmission, we are not ready. We are not technically ready,” he said amid the ongoing debate over the Senate’s decision on e-transmission of election results.
The former INEC commissioner warned that forcing the system without adequate preparation could expose the electoral process to greater risks in a country with limited digital resilience.
The Senate came under public scrutiny after its plenary session on Wednesday, where the lawmakers declined to amend Section 60 of the Electoral Act to compel INEC officials to electronically transmit results from polling units to the electoral commission’s result viewing portal.
But Lecky said the debate around instantaneous transmission was misplaced, noting that Nigeria still conducts elections manually and not through 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.
“We don’t do electronic voting anywhere. Are we doing electronic voting? We are very far away from it,” he stated.
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.
Inadequate Infrastructure
According to him, 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.
Lecky also maintained that results must first be manually counted at polling units before any form of upload could occur, stressing that the existing process already provides transparency.
“People are still coming with paper ballots. You have to count them for everybody to see one by one, before you now fill out the form EC8A, which is the most important document that needs to be filled out and signed by all the agents representing the parties,” he said.
Lecky warned that pushing for instant transmission without adequate infrastructure could expose elections to cyber risks, especially in a country with fragile digital resilience.
He called on INEC to rely on the tools of its Result Viewing Portal and Bimodal Voter Accreditation System until they began to work perfectly.
“We have to take the cue from even more mature democracies… these things are still happening. So you can imagine our own fledgling democracy,” he said.
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