What Nigeria Can Learn From Brazil About Secure Electronic Voting

As an Internet Service Provider operating in Nigeria, I have watched the recent legislative drama regarding the electronic transmission of election results with a mix of professional frustration and patriotic concern. The Senate’s recent amendment to the Electoral Act, making electronic transmission mandatory while controversially removing the “real-time” requirement, misses the forest for the trees. […]

As an Internet Service Provider operating in Nigeria, I have watched the recent legislative drama regarding the electronic transmission of election results with a mix of professional frustration and patriotic concern. The Senate’s recent amendment to the Electoral Act, making electronic transmission mandatory while controversially removing the “real-time” requirement, misses the forest for the trees. We are currently obsessed with how to move the result, when we should be focused on how we generate it.

The hard truth is that Nigeria’s obsession with “real-time transmission” is a technological bandage on a structural wound. We are trying to use 21st-century connectivity to fix a 19th-century manual voting process,and it isn’t working. If we want credible elections in 2027 and beyond, we need to stop fixing the pipe and start fixing the source.

The Immediate Crisis: The 50% Coverage GapLet’s look at the logistics for the upcoming General Elections. The reality on the ground, which I see daily in my network operations, is that credible 4G LTE coverage exists in barely50% of our polling unit locations. In vast swathes of the North and the rural South, the”network” is a ghost.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) cannot expect to transmit results electronically from these locations using terrestrial masts that do not exist. Building new towers takes years and millions of dollars. We do not have that time. For the upcoming election, INEC must urgently pivot to a Lease-Don’t-Buy satellite strategy.We do not need to burden the national budget by purchasing thousands of Starlink or VSATterminals that will sit rotting in warehouses for four years.

Instead, INEC should lease these terminals strictly for the election period, with data subscriptions active only for that month.This approach minimises capital expenditure and creates an instant “connectivity bridge” forthe rural areas where the BVAS currently fails. This is the only way to ensure that the new”mandatory transmission” law doesn’t become a tool for disenfranchisement in remote areas.

The Long-Term Fix: The Brazil Model However, satellite connectivity is just a stopgap. The ultimate destination for Nigeria must be Electronic Voting, not just Electronic Transmission. We should be looking to Brazil, a fellow developing nation that has solved this problem. The Brazilian Urna Eletrônica does notrequire a 4G signal. It works completely offline. It is an “air-gapped” fortress. In Brazil, the trust isn’t in the internet connection; it is in the machine and the papertrail.

The “Printed Receipt” (or VVPAT) is the firewall we are missing. In a proper electronicvoting system, the voter taps a screen, and a printer behind a glass window showsthem a paper slip confirming their vote before dropping it into a sealed box.This system kills two birds with one stone: it eliminates the “invalid votes” and bad handwriting of manual ballots, and it creates a physical paper trail that can be audited if the digital count is challenged.

The Vision for 2031: Direct-to-DeviceBy the 2031 General Election, the conversation about connectivity will have changed again.We are currently witnessing the birth of “Direct-to-Cell” satellite technology, where standard smartphones will connect directly to satellites without needing a dish. If INEC adopts a leasemodel now, we avoid being stuck with obsolete hardware when this new technology matures.

By 2031, we won’t need clunky terminals; the voting devices themselves will simplybeam results to the cloud from anywhere on Earth. But technology is only as good as the process it serves. If we continue to vote manually andonly use tech to take pictures of handwritten sheets, we will continue to have disputes. It is time to be bold. Let’s use the next election to patch our connectivity holes with leasedsatellite connectivity where necessary, but let’s set our sights on the real prize: a fully electronic, offline-capable, paper-verified voting system that restores the one thing our elections lack most, which is trust.

Diseye Isoun, CEO Content Oasis Ltd, writes from Abuja