A former National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Mustapha Lecky, has said Nigeria does not need real-time electronic transmission of election results, insisting that the country is neither legally nor technically ready for it.
Lecky made the comments when he appeared as a guest on Channels Politics Today programme on Friday evening.
The PUNCH reports that the Senate came under intense public backlash after its plenary session on Wednesday, where the lawmakers declined to amend Section 60 of the Electoral Act to compel officers of the Independent National Electoral Commission to electronically transmit results from polling units to the Electoral Commission’s Result Viewing Portal.
During the interview, Lecky said the debate around instantaneous transmission was misplaced, noting that Nigeria still conducts elections manually and not through electronic voting.
“I think it doesn’t really make sense to me that we should be talking about instantaneous transmission of results live as it is happening from the polling area. It doesn’t make sense because we don’t do electronic voting anywhere,” he said.
The former INEC commissioner explained that electronic transmission could only logically follow electronic voting, which Nigeria has not adopted.
“Are we doing electronic voting? We are very far away from it,” he added.
Lecky argued that results must first be manually counted at polling units before any form of upload could occur, stressing that the existing process already provides transparency.
“People are still coming with paper ballots… you have to count them for everybody to see one by one… before you now fill out the form EC8A, which is the most important document that needs to be filled and signed by all the agents representing the parties,” he said.
He described calls for real-time electronic transmission as “baseless,” maintaining that Nigeria also lacked the technical infrastructure to support nationwide electronic transmission, citing gaps in mobile network coverage across thousands of polling units.
“For electronic transmission, we are not ready. We are not technically ready,” he said.
Lecky warned that pushing for instant transmission without adequate infrastructure could expose elections to cyber risks, especially in a country with fragile digital resilience.
“We have to take the cue from even more mature democracies… these things are still happening. So you can imagine our own fledgling democracy,” he said.
He, however, urged INEC to rely on the tools of its Result Viewing Portal and Bimodal Voter Accreditation System until they began to work perfectly.
“So what we need to do, I think, in terms of this transmission of results, is to rely on what is currently available and make sure it works perfectly, and it can work perfectly,” he stated.
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