A former Resident Electoral Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mr. Aniedi Ikoiwak, has cautioned Nigerians against the continued use of the term “real-time transmission” of election results, describing it as misleading and incompatible with Nigeria’s current electoral process.
Ikoiwak, while clarifying the long-running controversy surrounding result transmission, said the phrase “real time” has been wrongly applied to Nigerian elections, which are still largely manual.
According to him, voting in Nigeria typically begins around 8:00am and ends by about 5:00pm, making it logically incorrect to describe result transmission as happening in real time.
“There are certain vocabularies we use that become counter to the real intentions. What do we really mean by ‘real time’? Voting starts in the morning and ends in the evening, so how do you call the transmission of that process real time?” he asked.
Ikoiwak explained that true real-time transmission can only occur under a fully electronic voting system, where votes are cast electronically and transmitted instantly to a central portal.
“You can only have real time in elections if you have 100 per cent electronic voting, so that once you vote, it goes directly to the IReV. That is real time. Even in the United States, there is no real time because manual voting is still used in some areas,” he said.
The former commissioner stressed that the real priority for Nigerians should be ensuring that Presiding Officers transmit the already collated polling unit results, captured on Form EC8A, through the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) before leaving the polling unit.
“That is what we need in our electoral law. We must avoid the use of the word ‘real time’,” he advised.
Ikoiwak warned that introducing concepts alien to Nigeria’s electoral system into the law could create future legal and political crises.
“Making an electoral law and including things or words that are alien to our electoral system is a time bomb waiting to happen. Our elections are manual; only the accreditation process is electronic,” he noted.
He recalled the controversy that followed the 2019 general elections, when some politicians and lawyers went to court claiming that results stored on an alleged INEC server showed they had won.
According to him, INEC at the time clarified that there was no such server capable of receiving votes directly from manual voting.
“INEC explained that a server is a computer that connects other computers, indirectly saying that manual voting cannot transmit into a server. The matter eventually went to the Supreme Court,” he said.
Ikoiwak urged Nigerians, lawmakers, and stakeholders to focus on practical reforms that align with Nigeria’s existing electoral framework, rather than pushing terminologies that could fuel confusion and litigation in future elections.
