The Nigerian Electoral Commission used an electronic system to tabulate election results during the last presidential election. A system that has had a few hiccups.
Last December, the announcement was made with great fanfare: Inec, the Nigerian Electoral Commission, had launched the distribution to its regional branches of Bimodal Voter Accreditation Systems (BVAS). Machines supposed, according to officials of the institution, to cause “a change in the evolution of the Nigerian electoral system”. The revolution was underway, it will ultimately not take place. Worse, the BVAS machines were the source of great tension on the part of the opposition, when they were supposed to allow, according to Inec, to " organize the 2023 general elections without a hitch”.
However, while nothing forced Inec to launch an electronic system, the Electoral Commission wanted to innovate. The objectives of the BVAS machines are to capture the results of the polling stations and transmit them to Inec, thanks to a electoral results visualization portal called IReV. These two technological innovations should make it possible to "improve the transparency of electoral results and strengthen public confidence in electoral results", specified Inec, which added that the two systems should make it possible to avoid falsifying votes or the number of accredited voters.
Fraud charges
"In 2023, Nigerians want to go to the polls with the assurance that the BVAS and the IReV will protect their vote", wrote, at the end of last year, Samson Itodo, of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. The president of Inec, Mahmood Yakubu, then promised an enormous technological success and indicated: “The BVAS system for the conduct of elections is here to stay. There is no turning back”. The leader of the instance did not imagine that, a few weeks later, he was going to have to indicate that eight machines of the BVAS system had been stolen. But also that the system was going to have problems publishing the results quickly.
So much so that, less than two weeks after the presidential election, the Electoral Commission had to announce the postponement for a week of the elections of governors and local deputies, initially scheduled for March 11. Inec believes that it needs time to reconfigure its systems. The Commission is also asking for a delay to “have enough time” to back up the data stored on the BVAS machines.
After appeals, the opponents were refused by the courts their request to inspect the BVAS machines before their reconfiguration. But the Inec assures that it is not “opposed to the parties to the dispute inspecting the electoral material” and that “it will continue to grant all litigants access to the material” in the context of the various appeals. Still, the BVAS experience is, for the moment, not yet very conclusive. We will have to wait for the next elections, on March 18, to find out if the Inec has been able to readjust the situation.