By Muhammad Mamman
A former national commissioner of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mustapha Lecky, has said the country lacks the technical capacity to enforce mandatory real-time electronic transmission of election results, cautioning against what he described as a “misplaced push” for instant uploads from polling units.
Speaking on Politics Today, a Channels Television programme, Lecky argued that calls for immediate electronic transmission overlook a fundamental reality of Nigeria’s electoral process: voting is still conducted manually using paper ballots.
According to him, real-time transmission can only be effective in a fully electronic voting system, where ballots are cast and counted digitally.
“You cannot expect real-time transmission when the entire process is still manual,” Lecky said. “What happens at the polling unit is paper-based — accreditation, voting, counting and collation. Until that changes, expecting instantaneous electronic uploads is unrealistic.”
The former INEC official stressed that while technology has an important role to play in improving transparency, it must be introduced in line with Nigeria’s infrastructural realities, including internet connectivity, power supply and the technical capacity of election workers across thousands of polling units nationwide.
Lecky’s comments come amid renewed debate over electoral reforms, with civil society groups and political stakeholders pushing for stronger technological safeguards to curb rigging and restore public confidence in elections.
INEC currently uses the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and an online result viewing portal (IReV), but results are still physically collated before being uploaded, a process that has drawn criticism during recent elections.
Lecky urged policymakers to focus on gradual, practical reforms rather than rushing into systems the country is not yet equipped to sustain.
“Technology should support the process, not complicate it,” he said, calling for broader investment in infrastructure and capacity-building before any move towards compulsory real-time result transmission.
