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Samson Itodo is the Executive Director of Yiaga Africa. In this interview, he speaks on the gaps in the electoral act and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) guidelines, why the Commission should provide Nigerians with basic information concerning the movement of election results, and the reason the public should have access to the audit trails, among others. JOY ANIGBOGU brings the excerpts:
In the electoral process, particularly in terms of the management of election results to prevent the famous technical glitches. What are those gaps that your group, the civil society organisations are insisting upon? And wouldn’t it be more appropriate to wait as Professor Amupitan has disclosed that INEC is going to conduct what they call a mock election to test, their own structures and their own processes, or regardless of that mock exercise, those gaps are so evident that CSOs are insisting they need to be addressed now. What are your thoughts?
I think we’re actually late in the game because the Act was passed in February. We’ve had the Ekiti elections, we’ll have Osun elections in less than three weeks, and then we have the general elections. Now, the Act introduced new procedures for managing results, collation or transmission.
As you know, section 60 sub 3 makes transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal compulsory. Now, what has happened and what the public needs to understand is that when polling is concluded on election day and the hard copy results sheets are completed, the results do not hit the IReV automatically, but there’s a validation process that takes place at the back end before those results make it to the IReV. Now, this is something the public needs to know because there is a validation process that takes place. So, once the polling officials take the scanned results sheets, it doesn’t hit the IReV directly. At the back end, there’s a validation that takes place. The second point and what the public needs to understand is that INEC has introduced what is called the electronic EC8A. In other words, when the presiding officer fills the hard copy results sheets, they’re expected to enter those results into an electronic version of that results sheet that is on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). It’s a new procedure that INEC has introduced. It tests-run this in FCT elections. It deployed this in the Ekiti elections and it’s going to do that in the Osun elections. Now, that new innovation was introduced by virtue of paragraph 40 of the regulations and guidelines for the conduct of elections. What has now happened, is that we now have three different tracks for results for one particular polling unit. The first one is the hard copy results sheets. The second one is the electronic EC8A on the BVAS. And then the third one is the scanned copy of the results sheets or the image of the results sheet that is uploaded on the IReV. The big question is what happens if there’s a discrepancy between these three different results. We don’t know which one will be used to resolve this. And so these are the issues.
The other point is, on the IReV you have the EC8As. Why don’t we have the EC8Bs, which is the results collation form for the ward collation and the local government collation? Because the public needs to follow the journey of the results from the polling units to the ward and to the local government level. INEC in the past promised that they will publish the EC8Bs and the EC8Cs. We hope that this new commission will do that. These are some of the gaps. What we have urged INEC to do is to issue a protocol. The public needs to understand the journey of results from the polling units to when declarations are made. And only when they understand that they can monitor and provide the oversight that is required to protect their votes in the Osun elections and in the 2027 elections.
In your policy statements, in addition to asking for a detailed journey of election results from the polling units to the INEC results viewing portal, you also talked about an independent assessment of the upgraded BVAS and IReV platforms. How will this work? What does this look like? What are your demands based on the observation of the last off-cycle elections? What were some of the gaps that you noticed? Was that implemented? How do you want to take this forward?
I think one thing we need to recognise is that the results management regime is the most contested component of our electoral administration value chain.
And next to it is party primaries. And because this is a domain where public trust has been undermined in the past, there are certain actions that need to be taken. For instance, when INEC says that results are validated before they go on the IReV, the big question is who is performing this validation? Is that validation process open? What safeguards are in place to ensure that compromised officials don’t upload mutilated or fake results on the IReV? The way to conduct this, and there are principles that govern the deployment of technology in elections.
The first one is transparency, and it simply means openness. The second one is auditability, that you must have an audit trail of every action that takes place at the back end, because the public cannot see what happens at the back end. So you don’t expect that the public will just trust the process when there’s no one party agent able to see what happens at the back end, or observers, or even media.
What happens in other climes is that stakeholders are accredited and they are given opportunities to see what happens on the back end. So they are also able to audit, because the greater the transparency, the higher the levels of confidence that there is nothing untoward, that there is no manipulation happening at the back end when INEC says it is validating results before they make it to the IReV portal. That’s what an audit process needs to look like.
And secondly, INEC has upgraded, they’ve upgraded the BVAS, they’ve upgraded the IReV. Now, the public only knows about this upgrade. We need to see, they need to explain what kinds of upgrades were made on these different systems, so that the public can be aware, so when they go to elections, whether in Osun or subsequent elections, we’re able to moderate their expectations about the functionality of these devices.
Can we add this to your recommendation, because let’s think that INEC should also give select representatives of political parties and civil society groups like you guys, the source code to their back end, on or before the election process.
Absolutely. In fact, this is what happens in places like Kenya, in places like South Africa. I know the arguments have always been issued about security, because when you divulge certain security information, it might be used to hack and compromise your system, but there are basic thresholds on terms of information that you can share. We’ve not even shared the basic one yet.
Because if you do that, you would help INEC, and that’s why when they said technical glitch happened, if people had the source code access, we were able to see the kind of technical glitch that happened.
They don’t need to write some reports that we don’t believe in. It is them that we have to ensure that there’s a level of transparency. Another thing that I wanted to bring forward that probably you can put in this list also, can we also have, apart from the first layer polling agent’s verification of the results, can we also have observer independent party verification of the results at the polling units? Because obviously we don’t trust INEC, and we don’t trust the ad hoc staff to do the right thing.
So, can we also put in a layer where an observer also authenticates the result, and there’s an authentication by the independent observer right there at the polling unit before it is then uploaded. Is it also a possibility we can think through?
It’s a possibility, but I just want to highlight the fact, and Nigerians will now appreciate why the media and civil society were quite miffed at the way the National Assembly managed the electoral amendment, especially that proviso in section 63. It’s going to come, we’re now going to experience the danger in that proviso, because what the National Assembly did is to say that the primary source of collation and declaration of results shall be the physical EC8As. So you can have all these safeguards if the EC8A is compromised, and this is why politicians ensured that the best precedence on the EC8As was to mutilate and falsify the form EC8A. Whether the results are false or they’re accurate, that will become the primary source of collation. So whether it’s the electronically transmitted results or the one on the IReV, the presiding officer and the collation officer will fall back on the physical result sheets, and that’s the danger that we were all screaming about when the National Assembly introduced that proviso. At the end of the day, the entire system has been designed in a way that delivers a certain outcome.
So, we have two options out of all of these safeguards. It’s either we use it for the 2031 election, or is there a possibility that most of the lawmakers, civil society liaised with that time, can still be talked to about the possibility of some of the reviews of the law. They’re already hurt as we speak today. Most of them are not returning. The law that they pushed out was used to push them out. They will start to put this conversation forward and probably see that once the next government is sworn in on May 29, June, July, as National Assembly members are coming in, we should start having this conversation and putting these gatherings as regards the next election cycle. Is there a possibility we can agree on?
Well, I think it’s a possibility. But when you look at how the reform process was managed, now let me go on record to say that there were some lawmakers that stood with the Nigerian people and those lawmakers have written their names in gold. But the majority of them supported this provision, why did they do that? They were pandering to certain interests that were at variance with public interests. They were only concerned about how the reform process would confer electoral victory in 2027. So if they yielded to pressure, they did that for selfish reasons. So, they should pay the price of the decision that they took to go against the people. When you’re making laws governing democratic processes, you need to be guided by public interest. And in this particular instance, the National Assembly, most of those lawmakers failed the Nigerian people.
The form EC8A, you complained about. Now, what is the legal hierarchy of that from EC8A, which is coming from guidelines and regulations of INEC? Two, Dr. Lawrence Bayode has already responded to Yiaga Africa. According to him, they cannot disclose their protocols, because there are security implications. But they have what they call geographical location safeguard. They also have pattern recognition safeguard, in which case, it won’t be possible for results to come from different locations that are not the exact locations where the polling took place. In any case, the recommendation about mock elections is something recommended by Yiaga Africa. The other issue is about CSOs saying they’re going to have their own independent electoral platform, election result reporting platform, called IREP. What’s the legal status of independent people, stakeholders, reporting their own election results? And finally, Professor Amupitan was saying that the law still has to be further amended because of controversies and processes. So even INEC recognises that there are gaps, but can we amend the law before 2027?
The question is, are we in a state of national election emergency that requires amendments to the laws? By standards, you shouldn’t amend your laws when you’re already in an election season. We’re just less than six months to the election. So I would strongly advise against amending the law because when you do so, you open the space, especially when you have politicians at the National Assembly who care about their own interests. They’re amending laws just to protect their interests, not public interests. So, I would strongly discourage that. The second point is about the validity or the legitimacy of parallel votes tabulation. By standards, citizens have a right to collate electoral jurisprudence or jurisdiction. Only INEC can declare results. So, any of this tabulating must ensure that they recognise that only INEC can declare results. The point you make regarding the validity of results, section 60 (3) is very clear. Section 60 (3), that the primary source of collating and declaring results is the physical form EC8A. That particular proviso was unwarranted, is draconian in every respect, and not necessary. They know why they inserted that particular clause to undermine electronic transmission of results because it’s a tool that could serve as a check and oversight on the process. So these are some of the issues. But I think at the heart of this, when you hear Dr. Lawrence Bayode, a very experienced IT expert who is the director of ICT, I agree with him to an extent. What the public is saying, don’t disclose your security information. But there’s what we call the minimum information that is required. And so far, we haven’t even attained those minimum thresholds.
If you say validation, who is validated? What is being validated? What happens if there’s a discrepancy? These are the kinds of information the back end must have, an audit trail. People should have access to those audit trails.