President Bola Tinubu signed the Electoral Act 2026 into law on February 18, 2026. The debates about how it got here and its surrounding controversy are legitimate, but they belong to yesterday. The more urgent question is what Nigerians do with the law they now have, and who they hold accountable for making it work.
There is real progress worth acknowledging. The new law formally enshrines BVAS as the mandatory accreditation instrument, giving statutory force to technology that has already proven itself. It mandates electronic transmission of results to IReV for the first time as a legal requirement, not a procedural courtesy. It introduces stiffer penalties for electoral offences, and allows voters to download their PVCs directly from INEC's website, thereby removing a barrier that cost millions their vote in 2023. These are hard-fought civic gains, and they deserve recognition.
But honesty demands confronting the central weakness that civil society, election policy observers, and human rights advocates now have a duty to address head-on. The e-transmission clause, for all its progress, contains a gap wide enough to swallow the gains around it. The law makes electronic transmission to IReV compulsory, but where transmission fails due to communication challenges, the physical Form EC8A takes over. The problem is not the fallback itself. Manual redundancy in a country with uneven infrastructure is not inherently unreasonable. The problem is that the law does not define what constitutes a transmission failure. It prescribes no independent certification process. It establishes no documentation trail that must accompany any invocation of the manual fallback. In practical terms, that means the discretion to abandon electronic transmission on election day still rests, ultimately, with officials at the polling unit and collation centre level.
The argument about whether mandatory real-time transmission should have been written into the law is over. The President has signed. The legislature has spoken. What remains and what must now become the central demand of every advocacy group, every election observer, every legal mind engaged with democratic reform in this country is that INEC be compelled to fill the gap the law has left with binding internal policy.
INEC holds the ball. The Electoral Act 2026 grants the commission discretion over the manner of transmission. That discretion is now INEC's institutional responsibility, and citizens must press the commission to exercise it with the kind of transparency and specificity that the law itself does not mandate. What is needed is a formal, publicly gazetted INEC regulation, not an internal memo, not a verbal assurance from a commissioner, not a press statement issued days before polling that defines precisely what counts as a transmission failure, prescribes the written documentation that must accompany every such invocation in real time, and establishes an independent verification mechanism before any manual override takes effect. Kenya's electoral commission is legally required to certify its transmission infrastructure at least 60 days before any election, with electronic results forming part of the official legal record. Nigeria's law does not go that far, but maybe INEC's internal framework should.
This is the conversation that election policy watchers, and civic groups must now have loudly and persistently. Not in Abuja alone. The senators and representatives who shaped this law represent constituencies across this country, and those constituencies deserve to understand what their legislators agreed to and what protections they still lack.
The question of INEC's institutional credibility is equally pressing. In 2023, INEC had uploaded only about a third of presidential results to IReV thirty-six hours after polls closed. Several states saw figures at collation centres diverge significantly from what BVAS had recorded at polling units. The commission offered no systematic accounting. The Supreme Court clarified what had long been technically true: IReV was a viewing portal, not a legal collation system, and what it displayed could not override manually signed result sheets. The Electoral Act 2026 begins to close that legal gap. INEC must be made to close the institutional one.
Nigeria does not lack laws. It has suffered from their selective application. The Electoral Act 2026 is a better law than the one it replaces. But its democratic promise will ultimately be measured not in its text but in its practice. And the practice will be shaped, above all, by what INEC chooses to do with the authority the Act has now formally vested in it.
For Nigerians who believe their votes should count, the task is to watch INEC. To demand its transmission protocols in writing. To insist that every polling unit across this country be covered by observers who understand that protecting a vote does not end when the ballot is cast, but extends through every step to the collation centre, and to be prepared, legally and organisationally, to document any invocation of the manual fallback in real time.
The complaints about how this law was passed
are on the record, as they should be. But the record that will matter most in
2027 is the one citizens help write between now and then. That work begins
today, with INEC.
great insight. thank you
great insight. thank you