By Abubakar Yunusa
The Youth Electoral Reform Project Consortium has urged the National Assembly Electoral Act amendment bill Conference Committee to adopt “mandatory electronic transmission of election results in real-time” as passed by the House of Representatives.
In a statement co-signed by the group’s executive directors on Thursday, they collectively welcomed the Senate’s emergency sitting to revisit key provisions of the Electoral Act amendment bill, describing it as a response to “countrywide public concerns over the changes they made last week to the version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives in December 2025.”
The group noted that on Tuesday, February 10, 2026, the Senate revisited Clause 60(3) of the Electoral Act Amendment Bill and adopted electronic transmission of election results, which it had earlier rejected.
“YERP-Naija believes that accountable leaders listen to the people and consistently act in their best interest,” the statement read.
However, it said the Senate did not go as far as the House of Representatives by mandating real-time transmission.
“Nigerians overwhelmingly asked for mandatory electronic transmission of election results in real-time to address human interference and compromise of election collation processes,” the group stated.
YERP-Naija described the transmission of the different versions of the bill to a Conference Committee for harmonisation as “a significant step in the electoral reform process.”
He added that the Senate President’s mandate to conclude harmonisation within a week so that the President can assent to it by the end of February 2026 “is a good commitment that Nigerians expect them to keep.”
The group, however, warned that Section 60(3) of the Senate’s version, which allows a return to manual transfer of results when technology fails, “opens a window for electoral fraud.” It said, “Individuals or groups with intentions to manipulate elections could leverage this provision to fake or cause internet connectivity problems in order to revert to the untrustworthy manual transfer process.”
The statement further read, “Internet connectivity across Nigeria has been improving over the years, and there is an opportunity to cover any existing dark spots before the 2027 general elections.”
It added that the BVAS “can record the exact time stamps when a result was uploaded when there is no network and immediately transmit it to IREV once the network returns,” noting that this “can prove that results were uploaded in real-time, even if they were not transmitted immediately.”
They further called on members of the Conference Committee to “carefully consider the facts and put the country before political expediency,” urging them to adopt the House version of the bill, which “limits human interference, manipulation, and electoral fraud through mandatory electronic transmission of election results in real-time.”
The group stressed, “Nigerian youth support it, and INEC has already adopted and significantly deployed it for the 2023 general elections,” adding, “What Nigerians are asking for is not new.”
