By Chris Osa Nehikhare
…the National Assembly now has a duty to all Nigerians — to close this loophole permanently and restore confidence in our electoral system.
This debate, quite frankly, has drifted away from the real issue. My position is straightforward: the Form EC8A captured and uploaded to the IREV portal, together with the accreditation data recorded by BVAS, must be given full legal recognition as authoritative election records.
BVAS has already addressed the long-standing problem of over-voting by electronically capturing accredited voters. Once accreditation is digitally recorded, the figures are no longer speculative — they are verifiable. That safeguard should not be rendered meaningless by sidelining the very records it produces.
The urgency of this demand is not abstract. It is rooted in experience — there exist Election Tribunal judgments where the courts declined to place weight on the IREV uploads and BVAS data, and instead relied on physical copies of Form EC8A that were widely contested as altered or inconsistent.
In 2023, the explanation given was that there had been a “glitch,” while a previous Supreme Court judgment held that the manually completed Form EC8A remained the only result sheet recognised by law. That interpretation effectively reduces technological safeguards to mere administrative tools without evidentiary consequence.
That cannot be the intention of electoral reform.
If the law permits the capture and upload of Form EC8A, and if BVAS is deployed to authenticate accreditation, then those records must carry legal weight. Otherwise, the system creates a digital trail for transparency but denies it legal value when it matters most.
The issue is not technology for its own sake. It is credibility. It is consistency. It is ensuring that the official record of an election cannot be displaced by questionable paper substitutes.
Until the law clearly recognises the uploaded Form EC8A and BVAS data as authoritative, the integrity of the electoral process will remain vulnerable — and public confidence will continue to suffer.
The time has come to move from debate to decisive legislative action. We therefore call on the National Assembly to enact clear, unambiguous amendments to the Electoral Act expressly recognising the Form EC8A uploaded to IREV and the accreditation data captured by BVAS as authoritative election records.
The law must remove all room for doubt. It must state plainly that once Form EC8A is completed, captured, and uploaded, and once BVAS accreditation figures are recorded, those records carry full evidentiary weight in any electoral dispute.
Furthermore, the law must prescribe strict penalties for any breach of this process. There must be consequences if more than one Form EC8A emerges for the same polling unit, especially where identical serial numbers appear on multiple versions, as was alleged in Edo 2024. The integrity of an election cannot coexist with duplicate or conflicting result sheets.
Electoral reform cannot be cosmetic. Technology introduced to enhance transparency must be protected by law. Where there are no consequences, there will always be manipulation. Where the law is ambiguous, credibility suffers.
The National Assembly (NASS) now has a duty to all Nigerians — to close this loophole permanently and restore confidence in our electoral system.
Hon. Chris Osa Nehikhare is a former Commissioner for Communication and Orientation in Edo State
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