The Senate on Wednesday passed the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill, 2026, following hours of heated debate, rejecting a proposal that sought to mandate the real-time electronic upload of polling unit results while approving wide-ranging changes to Nigeria’s electoral framework.
At the heart of the debate was Clause 60 of the bill, which deals with the transmission of election results. Lawmakers voted to keep the provision as it appears in the 2022 Electoral Act, allowing the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to determine how results are transmitted, rather than requiring presiding officers to upload them to the IReV portal in real time.
Under the retained clause, presiding officers must record the votes for each candidate on a form prescribed by INEC after counting at the polling unit. The form must be signed and stamped by the presiding officer and countersigned by candidates or their polling agents, where present. Chairman of the Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Senator Adeyemi Adaramodu, insisted that the disagreement was more about wording than substance, stressing that the Senate did not remove electronic transmission of results.
“On transmission, we said we are retaining Section 60 as it has always been. Results must be transmitted electronically and made available to the public,” Adaramodu said. “At the same time, the physical forms – Form EC8A and others – will still serve as evidence.
“They will remain evidence. So we now have correlating evidence: electronic transmission and physical documents. We have not removed electronic transmission.” He warned against what he described as over-legalising the electoral process through ambiguous language.
“When we talk about real time, how do we define real time?” he asked. “In some places, after voting, the network may not be available, and you may need to travel for one or two hours before you can transmit.
“So can you still insist on five minutes? We cannot subject this matter to semantics. What matters is that results reach the electorate electronically for verification,” Adaramodu said.