Technological Innovations and Electoral Integrity in Nigeria’s Electoral System: Panacea or Illusion? A Critical Assessment and Future Pathways

Abstract

Nigeria’s electoral system has, for over a decade, experienced notable technological solutions with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) implementing various electoral technologies, ranging from Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), Smart Card Reader (SCR), Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), INEC Voter Enrolment Devices (IVED) and INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV) etc. These were deployed to achieve, maintain, and advance electoral integrity in Nigeria. The Nigerian general elections of 2023, widely regarded as the most technologically driven electoral processes, also demonstrated the profound transformative potential of technological innovations, while exposing the structural, institutional, and political limitations of a would-be technocentric approach to democratic governance. Synthesising from the empirical evidence presented by the 2023 electoral cycle, peer-reviewed studies, election observation mission reports, INEC-in-house policy documents, and some comparative African case studies, this paper presents a critical assessment on whether the technological innovations are a panacea for Nigeria’s prevalent challenge of electoral integrity or whether, with their configuration at the moment, they are only a decorative illusion that pave ways for electoral manipulations instead of eliminating them, concealing the political pathologies fuelling a veneer of technological modernity. Five thematic domains were engaged in this study, viz: the political economy of electoral technology adoption; the BVAS and IReV demonstrated effectiveness and limitations; structural and infrastructural constraints; cybersecurity vulnerabilities; and the endemic human and institutional factors proving elusive to the resolving grip of technology alone. This study submits that technological innovation is neither a panacea for diseased electoral integrity nor an illusion, but a conditional amplifier of institutional quality, capable of fostering electoral integrity when incorporated in the certainty of a legal framework, institutional independence, suitable infrastructure, dynamic IT-governance, and political will, but not insulated from spectacular failures when adopted without considering the aforementioned. The paper then proposed some tangible pathways for the 2027 electoral cycle and beyond.