2027: Atiku raises concern over alleged outdated BVAS

By Lateef Ibrahim

Former Vice President and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), has said that the Osun State mock-accreditation failures of August 1, 2026 and Monday’s revelation by the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Director of ICT, Dr Lawrence Bayode, has exposed the inadequacies of the BVAS (Bimodal Voter Accreditation System), a critical asset in the conduct of elections in Nigeria.

Speaking on Arise TV on Monday, Bayode said that BVAS, which was first introduced into our elections in 2021, is currently running on Android version 10.

Atiku, in a statement from his media office on Tuesday, declared that what the INEC ICT Director did not say, however, is that the Android version 10 is outdated as it reached end of life in 2023, meaning that it is no longer getting updates or security patches.

The ADC Presidential candidate said that running an election technology platform like BVAS on an outdated operating system poses severe cyber and operational risks.

He wondered why INEC, with its humongous budget, cannot update the BVAS software long before the 2027 general elections or even before the series of off season elections like the Osun State governorship election during which the updated version would have been test run.

Atiku noted that the nonchalant attitude of handling the BVAS issue is suspicious and a deliberate attempt to subvert the integrity of the country’s elections.

According to him, this vulnerability could allow criminal elements or hackers to bypass the BVAS application entirely, gain root access to the device file system, and potentially alter cached voter logs or polling unit result files before they are transmitted.

He noted that since BVAS machines must necessarily transmit polling unit results over weak public telecommunication networks to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal, outdated cryptographic foundations elevate the risk of Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, where sophisticated actors could intercept, block, or manipulate data packets over the air.

The former Vice President pointed out that because BVAS handles both fingerprint and facial recognition, an outdated biometric framework (such as INEC is still using), has the potential of “reducing the system’s accuracy and resilience against spoofing methods such as fingerprint and photo bypasses.”

He expressed deep concern that “bugs or memory leaks within legacy system frameworks can cause the app to crash during peak voting hours —leading to “technical glitches” and delayed accreditations as have been witnessed in the past.”

He supported the position of cybersecurity exponents that “running critical national infrastructure on an end-of-life operating system creates a broad attack surface.

“ To safeguard election integrity, it is vital to perform an independent, comprehensive code and hardware audit of the BVAS devices.”