By Solomon OKPO
A senior governance and electoral process expert, Elder Aniedi Ikoiwak, has cautioned Nigerian lawmakers against the continued use of the term “real-time” in electoral discourse and proposed amendments to the Electoral Act, warning that it is misleading and technically incompatible with the country’s existing voting framework.
Ikoiwak, a veteran public official with extensive experience in electoral administration and democratic governance, said the concept of “real-time” transmission is being wrongly applied to Nigeria’s elections, which are largely manual in nature. He explained that, by definition, real-time refers to the exact moment an event occurs, a standard Nigeria’s electoral process does not meet.
According to him, voting in Nigeria typically begins around 8:00 a.m. and may run until 5:00 p.m., making it impractical to describe result transmission within that window as real-time.
He stressed that genuine real-time transmission is only possible under a fully electronic voting system, where votes are cast and instantly transmitted to a central database.
The expert noted that even advanced democracies, including the United States, do not operate entirely real-time electoral systems, as manual voting remains prevalent in many jurisdictions. In contrast,
Nigeria’s elections rely heavily on manual voting, with electronic technology currently limited to voter accreditation through the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
Ikoiwak argued that rather than promoting a vague and technically flawed notion of real-time transmission, electoral reforms should focus on a clear and enforceable requirement: the immediate upload of already-collated polling unit results, specifically Form EC8A, by presiding officers via BVAS to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) before leaving the polling unit.
He maintained that this provision is both realistic and legally sound and should be expressly entrenched in the Electoral Act to avoid ambiguity.
Warning of the dangers of imprecise legislative language, Ikoiwak described the insertion of unfamiliar or technically inaccurate terms into electoral law as “a time bomb waiting to explode,” capable of triggering confusion, litigation and needless political disputes.
He recalled the post-2019 general election controversies, when some politicians and legal practitioners approached the courts claiming electoral victories based on alleged results from an “INEC server.” INEC, at the time, denied the existence of such a server in the manner alleged, explaining that a server merely connects computer systems and that manual voting results could not automatically transmit to it.
The matter eventually reached the Supreme Court, underscoring the risks associated with conceptual and legal ambiguities in electoral processes.
The electoral expert therefore urged lawmakers and the public to ensure that ongoing and future electoral reforms are grounded in Nigeria’s operational realities, insisting that clarity, precision and technical accuracy must guide any amendments to the Electoral Act to safeguard the credibility of the nation’s democracy.
The Evangelist News
