Electoral Bill: Other Side of Clause 60(3)

Opeyemi Bamidele writes that the recent decision of the 10th Senate to retain Clause 60(3) in the Electoral Act 2022 Amendment Bill was taken in the overall public interest to ensure hitch-free voting and collation of results as the 2027 general election approaches

I have been inundated with messages from many concerned and well-respected stakeholders in the last fortnight. The contents of their messages are virtually the same. In all, they basically sought clarifications on the decision of the Senate to retain Section 60(3 & 5) of the Electoral Act, 2022 in the ongoing reform of our country’s electoral governance framework.

Regrettably, I could not respond to any of these messages for at least two reasons. First, I was on a national assignment outside the shores of our fatherland when I received the messages. Due to the import of the task at hand, I was time-constrained to respond to the messages one by one. Second, the messages largely reflect the mood of the citizenry at a time we are preparing for the 2027 general election. Hence, I came up with this intervention to collectively address the concerns of our constituents nationwide.

What then was the real issue that triggered the public debate? The debate borders on the resolve of the National Assembly to re-craft an electoral governance framework that reflects the stark realities of our fatherland. Consequently, the Senate resolved against Clause 60(3) of the Electoral Bill, 2026. The clause literally mandates the presiding officer to “electronically transmit the results from each polling unit to IREV portal in real time and such transmission shall be done after the prescribed Form EC8A has been signed and stamped by the Presiding Officer and/or countersigned by the candidates or polling agents where available at the polling unit.”

As Nigeria’s foremost democratic institution, the Senate recognises the strength of the clause. It recognises its potential to strengthen the integrity of our electoral process. It equally recognises that the clause has the high probability of deepening trust in the democratic institutions, especially the National Assembly and INEC.

With all these possibilities, Clause 60(3) of the Electoral Bill, 2026 is an initiative that any legislature or parliament globally will have embraced ordinarily. But this is just one side of the clause. We have a tradition of taking decisions based on the due consideration of  both sides of the coin. It is this tradition that spurred our inquisition into the other side of the clause because of the implications it may have over 237 million people in the future.

Further inquisition threw up an indispensable question. What are the pitfalls that may arise or that we may encounter if we make the real-time electronic transmission of election results mandatory? Resolving this question requires us to separate emotion from what is practicable, facts from fictions or reality from sentiment. As a result, we broadened our consultation and engagement to ensure that we did not take any decision that will further dampen the public confidence or that will plunge our fatherland deeper into crisis.

As pragmatic as we could, we sought empirical answers to this question by engaging principal actors in communications and power sectors, among others. In the end, we came up with useful findings that guided the decision of the Senate. First, we discovered that the Electoral Act 2022 had already guaranteed the transfer of the election result to  the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV). This is evident in Section 62(2), which established the National Electronic Register of Election Results. Introducing Clause 60 (3), which compels all the presiding officers to electronically transmit election results to IReV in real time, is no longer necessary since we have not fully embraced electronic voting.

This finding brings to the fore the need to differentiate electronic transmission of election results from electronic voting. Electronic transmission of election results does not mean Nigerians will vote electronically. It simply suggests that the presiding officers will transfer or transmit the election results to the IReV through the use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) after voting has been concluded and the results have been declared at the polling units according to the provision of the Electoral Act. In other words, it means we are voting manually and election results will be counted manually. After the whole process, election results will be transferred or transmitted to the IReV before all the stakeholders in each of the 176,974 polling units nationwide. This is the system we have been using since 2020, and it has significantly improved the integrity of our electoral process.

On the contrary, the latter precisely demands the use of electronic technologies to either aid or handle casting and counting ballots. This system basically allows voters to use an electronic device to make and record their ballot choices. In Nigeria, as of today, we are not yet at this stage considering the state of communication infrastructure. Even though we have not attained this stage, it is a system we all aspire to embrace in the future once our country’s power and communications infrastructure has been developed to the level that we can guarantee the seamless operations of electronic voting systems.

Second, we discovered that the capacity of our power infrastructure would not efficiently support the real-time electronic transmission of election results across the federation. We have a huge population spread across the federation. Compared to our population, official data shows that at least 85 million Nigerians still lack access to grid electricity. This figure amounts to about 43% of the population. This shortfall speaks to the state of our power infrastructure. Even though our generation capacity hovers roughly between 12,000 and 13,500 megawatts, our distribution and transmission capacity is acutely limited. As we all know, it can only deliver 4,500 megawatts to households nationwide.

With this state of our power sector, can we guarantee stable power supply nationwide on election days? Like most technologies, BVAS depends on batteries to function. If such devices are used continuously for a long time, their batteries will automatically drain, however powerful they are. It will then require that the devices are charged before they can be functioning again. Can we guarantee stable power supply nationwide on election days? If we cannot guarantee stable power supply nationwide, why should we make the real-time electronic transmission of election results mandatory? I think we must be careful of the choice we make so that we won’t create unnecessary problems for ourselves during and after the 2027 elections.

Consequently, to avoid a situation that will compound our country’s woes, it is better we make it discretionary since Section 62(2) of the Electoral Act, 2022 has already established the National Electronic Register of Election Results. The section states that the Registrar “shall be a distinct database or repository of polling unit by polling unit results, including collated election results.” This provision has mandated the presiding officers to transfer or transmit election results to the IReV at the polling units. Hence, the use of ‘real time’ in Clause 60(3 & 5) of the Electoral Bill, 2026  is nothing, but a bait for intractable crisis. We must avoid such a slippery path now in the interest of national peace and security.

Does this shortfall suggest that the federal government has not been addressing the problems with our power sector? In the last four years, we have achieved quite a lot. In 2022, for instance, the National Assembly reviewed the 1999 Constitution and delisted electricity from the Exclusive Legislative List. By implication, electricity is now under the Concurrent Legislative List. This means that the State Houses of Assembly can legislate on electricity. We have also amended the Electricity Act, 2025 to accelerate the decentralisation of the power sector while strengthening the power of the subnational governments to generate, transmit, and distribute electricity. This reform is indeed profound, and it will no doubt open our doors for more investments that can support the real-time electronic transmission of election results in the future.

The third finding borders directly on the coverage of our country’s broadband infrastructure. This is another fundamental consideration in every conversation that touches the electronic transmission of election results and electronic voting system. Currently, as official data have shown, our broadband coverage is on a steady rise, though very weak by the global standard.

As shown in our 2020-2025 National Broadband Plan, we targeted 70% national coverage by 2025. But we mix that target, though we are making real progress. Our broadband coverage now stands at 50.58%. Aside, as the NCC has shown, 4,834 communities with a population of 21 million still lack access to basic mobile connectivity.  This suggests that 49.42% of the federation still lack access to the internet network that we need to enable the real-time electronic transmission of election results nationwide.

This finding is not limited to our broadband coverage. Our level of internet use penetration offers some lessons that we cannot ignore in lawmaking. Right now, our internet user penetration is equally weak, precisely standing at 44.53% of our population. This indicates that a significant number of our people do not have access to the internet. This may actually seem irrelevant at the stage of reform. But it may be a spark that will become an inferno at the stage of implementation. For me, it is a highly consequential factor that cannot be thrown away for a republic of our size if election results must be transmitted real time because any delay, failure or hitch in real-time delivery or transmission can breed public suspicion, and public suspicion can trigger unrest now that we are all now more interested in who governs our fatherland than any time in our history.

Beyond these realities, comparing Nigeria to other countries further revealed the condition of our communication infrastructure. Speedtext Global Index, a global leader in connectivity intelligence, provides empirical data that further guides our decision. In 2025, for instance, the Index ranked Nigeria 85th out of 105 countries. Our mobile network reliability was 44.14 megabits per second. This is extremely low compared with UAE that has 691.76 mbps; Qatar with 573.53 mbps; Kuwait’s 415.67mbps; Bahrain’s 303.21 mbps and Bulgaria’s 289.41 mbps. The Index placed Nigeria far below average with respect to our mobile network reliability.

In terms of internet connection speed, Nigeria’s rating is quite disturbing in the case of fixed internet broadband. Out of 150 countries, Nigeria occupied 129th position with only 33.32 mbps. In this rating, Singapore came first with 410.06 mbps followed by UAE’s 382.35 mbps; France’s 346.25 mbps, Chile’s 348.41 mbps and Hong Kong’s 345.25 mbps. This rating is not where we were decades ago. We have made remarkable progress. To strengthen the reliability of our broadband and mobile network infrastructure, we have introduced different legislative initiatives that will attract much-needed investment to our digital economy and develop world-class communication infrastructure that can support the efficient deployment of e-governance to manage our public affairs.

All these empirical statistics guided the decision of the Senate before we retained Section 60(3 & 5) of the Electoral Act, 2022. They speak directly to the stark realities of our federation and not emotion or sentiment.

We recognise that lawmaking globally comes with huge responsibilities. As representatives of the people, we cannot enact laws based purely on public emotion or sentiment. These are  huge obligations that the Constitution places upon us all, and we cannot, for any reason, discharge our responsibilities to the detriment of the citizenry.

In democracy, lawmaking sits at the heart of public governance. Indeed, it is its lifeblood that freely flows in the veins of all public institutions. It does not respond to mere emotion or sentiment, but to facts, proofs or realities that can define or distort the future of our political system.  If our law does not capture the realities of the federation, then it is a script for anarchy or a ploy for destability. This deduction guided the decision of the Senate to recraft Clause 60(3 & 5) with a caveat while at the same time addressing the concerns of our people nationwide substantially. The caveat, in this case, is the outright deletion of ‘real time’ from the clause so that we will not end up with an electoral governance framework that cannot respond to the stark realities of our fatherland.

-Senator Bamidele, Leader of the 10th Senate, writes from Abuja.