Falana to N’Assembly: Make Polling Unit Results Upload Immediate, No Loopholes
By: Oluwaseun Lawal
The ballot is cast by hand. Counted by hand. Signed in ink.
But what happens next, that’s where the real fight is.
At a technical session on the Electoral Act amendment convened by ActionAid Nigeria in Abuja, senior lawyer Femi Falana made his position clear — lawmakers must remove ambiguity and make real-time electronic transmission of polling unit results compulsory. Not optional. Not subject to discretion.
Addressing legislators, civil society actors and legal minds in the room, Falana reminded them that Nigeria does not practise electronic voting. People still thumbprint paper ballots. What is being debated, he explained, is the immediate uploading of scanned copies of Form EC8A — the signed result sheets — straight from the polling units after counting.
He pointed to the 2023 general elections, when INEC deployed the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System nationwide. The device improved accreditation, yes. But result uploads were inconsistent. Later, the commission cited technical glitches.
Falana referenced explanations previously offered by former INEC Chairman Mahmood Yakubu — that BVAS does not need internet connectivity to accredit voters and can store scanned results for upload once network becomes available. The issue, Falana suggested, is not impossibility. It is clarity in law.
He also drew attention to the Supreme Court ruling in Atiku Abubakar & Anor v INEC & Ors (2023), which held that electronic transmission is allowed under the Electoral Act 2022, but not mandatory. That distinction, he argued, shifts responsibility back to lawmakers. If Nigerians want real-time uploads as a rule, the Act must say so clearly.
“The polling unit remains the most transparent stage,” he said. Once results move from that space, vulnerability increases. Delays creep in. Questions too.
Falana rejected arguments that equate real-time transmission with electronic voting, calling such claims conceptually misplaced. Nigeria’s system, he stressed, is manual voting with digital preservation — not digital voting.
On network concerns, he was blunt. Nigeria processes millions of electronic banking transactions daily, he noted, so connectivity gaps should not be an excuse for opacity. Infrastructure challenges exist, yes, but transparency should not wait for perfection.
Still, he acknowledged that transmission reform alone won’t fix everything. Vote buying. Party primary irregularities. Weak prosecution of electoral offences. Those remain.
But clarity in the law, he insisted, matters. Lawmakers must specify timing. Location. Consequences for failure to upload. Without that precision, compliance becomes selective — and litigation inevitable.
Democracy, he concluded, is not just about voting. It is about confidence that the votes, once counted, stay counted.
