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By Chinelo Obogo
Reacting to the senate’s reversal of earlier position on electronic transmission of election results, a civil society organisation, Advocacy Foundation said the Senate’s partial reversal on electronic transmission of election results was a hard won victory for Nigerian citizens and civil society advocacy.
In a statement, the CSO said that despite this shift, the Senate has again failed to fulfil its promise explicitly set out in its own legislative agenda, to amend the Electoral Act (2022) comprehensively to fix the glaring gaps identified during the 2023 elections.
By retaining a dangerous manual fallback caveat in cases of communication failure, the Senate continues to ignore the technical weaknesses that undermined the last general election.
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The Senate’s revised clause still retains a dangerous escape route by allowing physical result forms to become the primary basis for collation whenever electronic transmission fails due to so-called communication failure.
“Without strict safeguards, this provision risks recreating the same discretionary loophole that undermined public trust in 2023. The responsibility to fix these systemic weaknesses now rests with the Conference Committee of the National Assembly, led by Simon Lalong for the Senate and Adebayo Balogun for the House of Representatives.”
A human rights lawyer, Abdul Mahmud, who also reacted to the decision on his X handle, said: “Inserting “if” to the main section of a law creates the proviso, which either ensures that the main section doesn’t apply in particular circumstances or it is limited entirely.
“Courts’ narrow interpretation of a proviso can, in practice, end up swallowing the main section. This is where the Senate’s trick comes in. All that devious political power needs to do is undo the backhaul, fronthaul and midhaul of the connection networks, so INEC can collate results manually.”
