Ahead the 2027 general elections, the Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCS) and the Nigeria Diaspora Coalition for Change (NDCfC) have said electronic transmission of election results cannot stop electoral fraud.

The groups highlighted the interplay between technology and democracy, maintaining that the former could succeed in commerce but fail in democracy.

This was contained in a statement jointly signed by the Chief Executive Officer, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Mr. Yusuf Musa, and the Chairman of Nigeria Diaspora Coalition for Change, Prof. Adenike Grange, a copy of which was made available on Friday.

“We make these statements recognising that our democracy is still young and going through a growing phase. The integrity of our elections can go a long way to establishing us as the true giants of the black race. Our intervention focuses on our technical responsibility to ensure we can trust the systems.

“To be clear, election data is not the same as POS, WAEC or JAMB traffic. Those systems process transactional or institutional records whose failure causes inconvenience; electoral data carries constitutional authority whose compromise affects sovereignty.

“So the issue is not merely whether data can move electronically, but whether it can move with forensic integrity.

“Knowing that data is vulnerable during its lifecycle – Data At Rest, Data In Use, Data In Motion; a credible electoral architecture must address all three simultaneously, otherwise electronic transmission relocates distrust instead of eliminating it.

“We understand that those who favour electronic transmission do not believe that the public internet is inherently safe, but rather that verifiability is safer than discretion. A dedicated or hybrid network (private backbone with public redundancy) would indeed be more appropriate, combined with layered protections: device-level signing, end-to-end encryption, hash verification, mirrored servers.