February 22, (THEWILL) — President Bola Tinubu signed the Electoral Act 2026 into law on February 18 at the State House in Abuja, flanked by Senate President Godswill Akpabio, Speaker Tajudeen Abbas and his Chief of Staff, Rt. Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila and framed the legislation as a means of closing gaps and strengthening procedures ahead of Nigeria’s 2027 general elections. Within hours, the law had become one of the most contested pieces of legislation in recent memory, splitting opinion between those who see it as a pragmatic modernisation of the electoral process and those who regard it as a calculated retreat from the transparency gains of the past decade.
At the heart of the dispute is a provision governing how election results travel from polling units to the central count. The law requires presiding officers to transmit results electronically to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s Result Viewing Portal after the official result form, known as Form EC8A, has been signed and stamped. So far, so progressive. Yet the same provision includes a caveat: where electronic transmission fails because of communication problems, the signed paper form becomes the primary source for collation and the declaration of results. It is this fallback clause that has provoked the fiercest criticism and understandably so.
Opposition parties have been unsparing. The Peoples Democratic Party called the signing “a dark day for democracy,” while the African Democratic Congress went further, describing it as a “death warrant for credible elections” and questioning why the president gave his assent so swiftly despite widespread public objections. Civil society groups, many of whom had protested outside the National Assembly during the bill’s passage, argue that the conditional nature of electronic transmission fatally weakens the safeguards introduced under the 2022 Act. Their concern is sharpened by the fact that “communication failure” is nowhere clearly defined in the legislation, leaving its interpretation to the very officials who stand to benefit from ambiguity.
The technical case against the manual fallback is substantial. Former INEC chairman Mahmood Yakubu repeatedly assured the public that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System stores all data offline. Each device records every accreditation and every vote locally; once it reaches an area with connectivity, the stored data uploads automatically to the central server. Telecommunications operators have likewise dismissed claims of inadequate infrastructure, stating that network coverage extends to most areas of the country sufficiently. If the hardware can hold its own records and the networks are broadly functional, the argument for treating a paper form as the definitive record looks less like pragmatism and more like a deliberate choice.
Defenders of the provision reject this reading. Akpabio has argued that the law formalises the portal’s role for the first time, something the 2022 Act never explicitly did, and that retaining the signed form as a backstop simply reflects the practical difficulty of guaranteeing connectivity across more than 170,000 polling units. Tinubu himself remarked at the signing ceremony that final results must depend on human oversight rather than machines alone, urging observers to consider Nigeria’s broadband capacity before demanding a purely digital process. Supporters in the ruling All Progressives Congress contend that insisting on real-time transmission everywhere could disenfranchise voters in remote communities where signals remain patchy.
The procedural history of this clause has done little to inspire confidence. Reports indicate that the Senate initially rejected the proposal for real-time transmission outright, adopting a modified version only after a public outcry. Critics allege that last-minute changes were made on the floor of the chamber without the full wording being disclosed to all members. The Labour Party noted that the bill passed through both chambers and received presidential assent within 24 hours of final approval, a speed that struck many as incompatible with genuine deliberation.
Away from the transmission debate, the Act contains a reform that has drawn broad approval. The abolition of indirect primaries, where small pools of delegates select party candidates, represents a significant structural change. For years the delegate system functioned as a marketplace in which nominations were effectively auctioned, with payments sometimes demanded in foreign currency. Under the new law, all card-carrying party members will vote directly in primaries, or candidates may emerge through consensus. Akpabio praised the shift for promoting participatory democracy, and Abbas argued that it levels the playing field by weakening the grip of powerful brokers. Peter Ameh, former chairman of the Inter-Party Advisory Council, offered a dissenting view, calling the mandate an infringement on the constitutional autonomy of parties to manage their own affairs and urging legal challenges.
The practical obstacles are real. Conducting nationwide primaries involving millions of voters demands administrative capacity that many parties have never demonstrated, and the integrity of membership registers will be critical. If registers can be stuffed with fictitious names, the reform merely shifts the locus of manipulation rather than eliminating it.
Several smaller but noteworthy provisions round off the legislation. The notice period for elections has been shortened from 360 to 300 days, partly to avoid overlap with religious observances such as Ramadan, though critics warn that compressed timelines could hamper voter education. The deadline for releasing funds to INEC has been cut from 12 months to six months before polling day, a change that may constrain the commission’s planning window. Acceptable identification for voter registration has been narrowed to birth certificates, passports and National Identification Numbers, excluding driver’s licences. Against these restrictions, the Act introduces a welcome provision allowing voters to download their permanent voter cards from the INEC website, addressing a logistical failure in 2023 when millions of cards went uncollected. Prison inmates gain the right to register and vote for the first time.
Whether the Electoral Act 2026 ultimately strengthens or undermines Nigerian democracy will depend less on the text and more on the conduct of those who implement it. The direct primary reform offers a genuine opportunity to broaden political participation, and the formalisation of the results portal is, on paper, an advance. But legislation that leaves its most consequential provision open to discretionary interpretation is legislation that invites the very disputes it claims to resolve. With the 2027 elections now on the horizon, the burden falls on citizens, civil society and the judiciary to ensure that a law built on compromise does not become a vehicle for something worse.
