Nigeria Senate denies blocking electronic transmission of election results

Nigeria’s Senate president, Godswill Akpabio, has said the upper chamber did not reject the electronic transmission of election results, but merely retained the wording of the existing electoral law.

Akpabio made the clarification on Saturday in Abuja while speaking at the launch of a book on the challenges faced by legislators in Nigeria, amid public criticism of the Senate’s recent amendment of the country’s electoral framework.

He said the Senate agreed only to remove the phrase “real time” from the relevant provision, arguing that it could expose elections to legal disputes in the event of technical failures.

“If you say ‘real time’ and there is a network or grid failure, someone will go to court and say it ought to have been real time,” Akpabio said. “That was all we said.”

According to the Senate president, electronic transmission of results remains permissible under the law, with flexibility left to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to determine the appropriate mode of transmission, taking into account technological and security constraints.

Akpabio added that the Senate would continue to pass legislation that reflects the wishes of the Nigerian people.

His comments followed the passage last week of the Electoral Act 2022 (Repeal and Re-enactment) Amendment Bill 2026, which sparked controversy after lawmakers declined to adopt a proposal that would have made electronic transmission of results mandatory.

The rejected amendment sought to compel presiding officers to upload polling unit results to INEC’s online results portal in real time after official forms had been completed and endorsed.

Instead, the Senate retained the existing provision of the Electoral Act, which allows results to be transmitted “in a manner as prescribed by the Commission”.

Reacting to the controversy, a former Senate president, David Mark, said the National Assembly should allow INEC to determine whether election results are transmitted electronically.

Mark, now a leading figure in the African Democratic Congress (ADC), said his party fully supports the electronic transmission of election results.