By Collins Okeke and Jesujoba Tosu

On February 18, 2026, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed the Electoral Act 2026 into law. The Act repeals and re-enacts the Electoral Act, establishing a new legal framework for the conduct of elections, including Nigeria’s general elections scheduled for 16 January 2027 (presidential and National Assembly) and 6 February 2027 (governorship and state assemblies). This analysis examines the progress the Act represents, identifies the legislative gaps it leaves open, and assesses the legal landscape those gaps create for electoral disputes arising from the 2027 elections.

Progress
The Electoral Act 2026 introduces several provisions of legal significance. Section 60(3) gives statutory recognition to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) and mandates the electronic transmission of Form EC8A from polling units to that portal, an obligation that did not exist under the 2022 Act, which left the entire transmission process to INEC’s operational discretion.

This distinction carries direct jurisprudential consequences. Under the 2022 Act, the Supreme Court held that IReV is a public viewing portal and not a legal collation system, with the result that electronically transmitted results carried no legal weight against manually collated figures. That position is now overridden: election tribunals in 2027 must receive IReV data as admissible evidence and are obligated to engage with it.

Section 47 gives statutory recognition to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). Section 60(6) creates criminal liability, being six months’ imprisonment or a fine of N500,000, or both, for any presiding officer who wilfully frustrates electronic transmission. Section 3 establishes a dedicated fund for INEC, with disbursement mandated no later than six months before a general election, providing INEC with greater financial independence and planning certainty than was available under the 2022 regime. Section 84(2) mandates direct and consensus primaries as the only permissible modes of candidate selection, removing the indirect primary system and its attendant delegate manipulation from Nigerian electoral practice.

Legislative gaps
The communication failure exception in section 60(3)
The mandatory transmission obligation in Section 60(3) is qualified by a proviso of significant legal consequence: where electronic transmission fails ‘as a result of communication failure,’ the manually completed Form EC8A becomes the primary source for collation and declaration of results. The Act nowhere defines ‘communication failure.’ It is silent on whether the phrase encompasses complete network absence, intermittent connectivity, server congestion, equipment malfunction, human error, or deliberate interference. This definitional vacuum generates at least three distinct legal problems.

First, it creates an asymmetric evidentiary burden in election petitions. A petitioner challenging the invocation of the manual fallback must effectively prove that no genuine communication failure occurred, a negative proposition that is structurally difficult to establish, particularly where the Act imposes no requirement on presiding officers to document the circumstances of a claimed failure contemporaneously. The absence of mandatory documentation converts what should be an objectively verifiable technical question into one that turns entirely on oral assertion.

Secondly, the Act provides no verification mechanism. It does not specify whether the presiding officer’s subjective determination is legally sufficient to invoke the exception, whether INEC’s technical personnel must independently verify the claim, or whether a collation officer has authority to reject an unsubstantiated assertion of failure. Leaving this question to unguided individual discretion at over 176,000 polling units creates conditions for inconsistent and unreviewable application of a provision that directly determines which result, electronic or manual, governs collation.

Thirdly, although Section 60(6) penalises wilful frustration of transmission, it provides no legal procedure for distinguishing a fabricated claim of communication failure from a genuine one. A presiding officer who asserts failure without documentation faces no formal accountability unless wilfulness is separately established. The penalty provision therefore operates only at the margins, leaving deliberate abuse of the exception effectively unaddressed by the statute.

Absence of a time requirement
Section 60(3) mandates transmission but prescribes no timeframe within which it must occur. A presiding officer is in technical compliance with the statute whether results are uploaded immediately after counting or hours later.

This matters because the anti-manipulation logic of electronic transmission depends on the upload occurring whilst polling agents, party representatives, and observers remain present at the polling unit, creating a verifiable link between what was announced and what was uploaded. An upload made after the presiding officer has departed with paper forms cannot be verified by those who witnessed the count. As enacted, the provision reduces electronic transmission from a real-time accountability mechanism to a post-hoc documentation obligation, and the window it was designed to close remains open.

Narrowed petition grounds under Section 138
Section 138(1) of the Electoral Act 2026 limits the grounds on which an election may be questioned to two: that the election was invalid by reason of corrupt practices or non-compliance with the Act’s provisions, or that the respondent was not duly elected by a majority of lawful votes cast at the election. This represents a material departure from Section 134(1) of the 2022 Act, which recognised three grounds, including the additional ground that the person whose election is questioned was, at the time of the election, not qualified to contest.

The 2026 Act removes qualification entirely as a cognisable petition ground. The evident legislative intent is to convert qualification into a pre-election matter, that is, a dispute to be resolved before voting commences, not after. On that premise, a party aggrieved by the candidacy of a constitutionally disqualified person must pursue the pre-election route; the tribunal’s jurisdiction will no longer extend to it.

To be continued tomorrow.
Okeke is partner and head, governance advisory practice while Tosu is an associate at Olisa Agbakoba Legal (OAL).