Let me begin by stating this clearly:

I am not against electronic transfer of election results.

What I find troubling is that many of those loudly clamouring for it do not fully understand what they are actually demanding.

What you are asking for is not merely electronic transfer of results.

You are asking for internet-powered electronic transmission of election results, coordinated technologically and procedurally by INEC through platforms like IREV and BVAS.

That distinction matters.

Some days ago, someone challenged me on why I keep making this clarification. I gave an analogy: the clamour for electronic transmission reminds me of the clamour for the return of petrol subsidy. Many people demanded it passionately without fully understanding the structural and economic implications.

So I asked my usual "weeding questions" — questions designed to test whether we truly understand what we are advocating for.

Most of those questions were either unanswered or poorly addressed.

Let me ask them openly here. Hopefully, they will guide us toward knowledge rather than emotion.

Foundational Questions

1. Do you understand the importance of elections?
   Do you know that problems during elections can trigger a constitutional crisis — leading to chaos or a vacuum in leadership?
2. Do you know what a constitutional crisis is?
   And do you understand the damage such a crisis can inflict on the stability of a nation?
3. Do you understand that one of the core responsibilities of legislators is to prevent constitutional crises?
   Laws must employ checks and balances. They must be justiciable. They must anticipate failure points.
4. Do you understand the existing system well enough to explain it to a five-year-old?
   Can you clearly outline its checks and balances? Its merits and its demerits?
5. Do you understand the new system being proposed?
   Can you outline its merits and demerits with the same clarity?
6. Can you confidently say the new system solves all the challenges of the existing system?
7. Are you certain the new system will not introduce new, untested problems — problems for which adequate safeguards do not yet exist?

These are not partisan questions. They are governance questions.

The Technical Questions (For the Tech Bros and Sisters)

Let us go deeper.

8. Do you know what a Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is?
   If electronic transmission becomes mandatory and such an attack succeeds, attackers could potentially disrupt or invalidate election results.
9. Do you understand that shifting to electronic transmission does not eliminate critical infrastructure risks — it merely changes them?
   Instead of protecting ballot boxes, you now must protect:
   • BVAS/IREV machines
   • Telecom masts
   • Fibre optic cables
   • Base stations
   • Satellite systems
   • Power sources
10. An attack on any one critical telecom infrastructure could compromise result transmission.
11. Do you understand that electronic transmission would make Nigeria dependent on server and internet infrastructure that may not reside within our jurisdiction?
    Do you understand what that implies for national security?
12. Do you know that electronic results can still be manipulated?
    Manipation can potentially occur at multiple levels:

• Polling unit level
• Man-in-the-middle level
• Telecom provider level
• Developer level
• Admin user level
• Hosting provider level

I can identify at least seven possible points of compromise.

Now, if such manipulation occurs, what mechanisms exist for redress — especially if manual records have been discarded?

Some say, "We will do forensic analysis."

I laugh in Spanish.

A Necessary Clarification: Not All Electronic Transmission Is Internet-Based

It is important to clarify something many people overlook.

Electronic transmission is not synonymous with internet-based transmission.

There are multiple forms of electronic transmission that do not depend on the public internet. For example:

• Closed-circuit transmission over dedicated private networks
• Satellite-based point-to-point systems not exposed to open internet routing
• Encrypted offline uploads transferred through controlled physical relays
• Secure intranet systems isolated from the global web
• Air-gapped systems where data is electronically captured but not transmitted over the internet

These are all electronic systems.

The moment you introduce the open internet into the equation, the game changes.

The internet is not a neutral infrastructure. It is a globally interconnected environment with multiple routing points, third-party dependencies, foreign-controlled backbone infrastructure, and countless potential attack surfaces. Once election transmission depends on it, you are no longer dealing with just electoral procedure — you are dealing with cybersecurity warfare, telecom sovereignty, cross-border data jurisdiction, cloud hosting exposure, and critical infrastructure vulnerability.

That is not a small shift.

It transforms elections from a primarily physical security challenge into a hybrid physical-digital national security operation.

And national security systems must be engineered with extreme caution.

The Legislative Responsibility

Legislation, especially legislation governing elections, must anticipate worst-case scenarios — not best-case optimism.

Laws should not be passed based on political excitement or public pressure. They must be stress-tested intellectually before they are stress-tested nationally.

Once you legislate a mandatory internet-based transmission system, you are locking the nation into a technological dependency model that may:

• Rely on infrastructure outside national jurisdiction
• Be vulnerable to sophisticated cyber attacks
• Introduce systemic failure points that could invalidate entire elections
• Create new forms of constitutional crisis that current frameworks were not designed to handle

And remember: elections are not beta software releases.

You do not get to "patch" a constitutional vacuum in real time.

The Real Issue

I actually have 21 questions, but I will limit public discourse to these for now.

Anyone who can answer these questions honestly will likely conclude that the debate should not be framed as:

"Electronic transmission or nothing."

Rather, the responsible approach is this:

Electronic transmission in conjunction with the existing system.

Use it. Test it. Stress it. Improve it. Build safeguards around it. Identify its weaknesses over multiple election cycles.

That is how mature democracies adopt critical infrastructure technology.

Blind absolutism is not reform.

Careful, iterative improvement is.

If we truly care about elections, national stability, and constitutional continuity, then our advocacy must be rooted in knowledge, not slogans.

Democracy is too important to be redesigned on the basis of excitement.

If reform is necessary, let it be intelligent reform — grounded in technical understanding, constitutional awareness, and national security foresight.

Anything less would be reckless.