“Shall” Not “May”: Senate Claims Electoral Amendment Now Makes Rigging Impossible
Senator Onyekachi Nwaebonyi, representing Ebonyi North Senatorial District, has declared that the latest amendment to the Electoral Act has fundamentally altered the legal architecture governing Nigerian elections, asserting that mandatory electronic transmission of results now renders rigging impossible under the law.
Appearing on ARISE Television on Wednesday, Nwaebonyi articulated the Senate’s position on the amended legislation, emphasising that the revised framework shifts electronic transmission from a discretionary option to a statutory obligation. He argued that this distinction carries profound implications for how future election petitions will be adjudicated.
“The difference between the Electoral Act of 2022 and what we are doing now, and which will make the decision of the court different from what happened in INEC versus Atiku, which is a very popular case, as far as this electronic transmission of votes is concerned, is that this time, the National Assembly have inserted it in our law,” the senator stated.
He drew specific attention to the linguistic precision employed in the amendment. “And the word there is ‘shall’, not ‘may’. That is the difference,” Nwaebonyi said.
The reference to INEC versus Atiku pertains to the Supreme Court judgment delivered in 2019 regarding the 2019 presidential election petition. In that matter, the court held that the Electoral Act then in force did not mandate electronic transmission of results, and the use of card readers and other technology by INEC was operational rather than statutory. The distinction between “shall” and “may” has since become central to legal arguments concerning INEC’s compliance with its own regulations.
Nwaebonyi further contended that the amendment subordinates INEC’s operational guidelines to the expressed provisions of the Electoral Act, including those governing the Result Viewing Portal, IREV.
“And moreover, the Electoral Act overrides the INEC guideline. If there is conflict between the guideline and the Act, the Act is an Act of the parliament. The guideline is a guideline of the agency. So the Electoral Act supersedes the guideline,” he said.
The senator’s remarks come amid heightened public scrutiny of the National Assembly’s handling of electoral reforms. The Senate had reconvened in emergency session on Tuesday following widespread criticism of earlier proposed changes to the Electoral Act, particularly provisions that critics argued weakened the legal status of electronically transmitted results and the IREV portal.
The IREV portal was introduced by INEC to upload polling unit results in real-time during elections, allowing public access to scanned result sheets. In the 2023 general elections, technical failures and delayed uploads became flashpoints in several governorship and presidential election petitions, with litigants arguing that non-transmission undermined the integrity of the process.
Nwaebonyi acknowledged that legislative action alone is insufficient to guarantee credible elections. “All that is required is for all eyes to be on the ball by all political players,” he said, underscoring the role of political parties, candidates, and civil society in enforcing compliance.
The senator maintained that the amended Act would produce a decisive shift in judicial outcomes. “So with what we have done now, nobody can rig election in Nigeria,” he asserted.
His declaration, however, immediately reignited debate among electoral stakeholders. The amended Act has yet to be transmitted to the President for assent, and INEC has not publicly issued a formal response to the changes. Legal experts have previously noted that while an Act of the National Assembly supersedes agency guidelines, enforcement remains contingent on judicial interpretation and the commission’s administrative capacity to implement mandatory electronic transmission across more than 176,000 polling units.
The National Assembly has in recent years oscillated between expanding and contracting the statutory framework for election technology. The 2022 Electoral Act, signed into law by former President Muhammadu Buhari, introduced electronic transmission of results but permitted INEC to determine when and where it would be deployed. This discretionary language produced conflicting interpretations and became a central point of litigation following the 2023 elections.
The current amendment, as described by Nwaebonyi, removes that discretion. The mandatory “shall” now governs the transmission obligation, placing the commission under statutory duty rather than operational discretion. Whether this language survives judicial scrutiny and executive assent, and whether INEC’s infrastructure can meet the legal standard, remain open questions.