By Wale Alonge
The updated and newly passed electoral act does not abrogate electronic transfer of results. What it didn’t do is to approve real time transfer of result from the polls to a central collation center, a process that is susceptible to hacking and other cybersecurity manipulation in a country with a 19th century digital infrastructure. Every Nigerian understands almost instinctively the ubiquitous network failure just to make phone calls.
Many states in the USA including Florida where I had voted for decades, the voting system incorporates old analog paper ballots that are then scanned electronically into a scanner reader. In case of very narrow margin of victory, in election, those paper ballots can be manually hand counted. Here we are talking about the USA, the country which has one the most advanced digital and cybersecurity infrastructure in the planet opting for an amalgam of analog and digital voting model. Even with all these safeguards, President Trump almost six years later is still shouting that he was rigged out in his 2021 presidential loss. Just imagine the situation in Nigeria where no politician ever accepts that they lost any election fair and square.
So, all this hyperventilating about the Nigerian Senate rejecting “real-time” transfer of election result, is a case of political grandstanding and the boy who cries wolf on the part of the opposition. It is a case of already complaining about being rigged out long before the election ever takes place.
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All the noise about digitalization of the election process, fails to recognize that what is still judged as the most transparent election in Nigerian electoral history was the 1993 presidential election won by Chief MKO Abiola which adopted the Option A4 system, an open-ballot process where voters queued behind the picture of their preferred candidate. So all the hopla about realtime result upload is a pile of Kabiku political theater of the absurd.
The Senate the upper chamber simply ruled out the real-time transmission of election results which again is fraught with the danger of the cybersecurity hacking and digital manipulation.
Instead, the senate passed a bill that retained the provision for electronic transfer of results in line with existing provisions of the Electoral Act, maintaining the current legal framework on result management.
Wale Alonge
