2027: Itodo Says IReV Is Reclaiming Its Place As Game-changer

The Executive Director of Yiaga Africa, Samson Itodo, has said last Saturday’s Osun governorship election showed that the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Result Viewing Portal (IReV) appears to be reclaiming its place as a consequential game-changer in Nigeria’s electoral architecture, after the crisis of confidence that followed the 2023 general election.

According to the election, democracy and public policy enthusiast, the Osun experience reaffirmed the value of electronic transmission and real-time public access to polling-unit results as safeguards against manipulation and mechanisms for strengthening transparency, auditability and citizen oversight.

INEC on Sunday declared the candidate of the Accord Party, Governor Ademola Adeleke, as the winner of the Osun governorship election.

Adeleke scored 511,067 votes to defeat the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Oyebamiji, who polled 444,815 votes.

Results of the election had been praised by many political parties, leaders, civil society organisations and observers as a reflection of the people’s will.

In an article titled “Osun 2026: Is IReV Reclaiming Its Title as Nigeria’s Electoral Game Changer?” made available to LEADERSHIP, Itodo argued that for much of Nigeria’s electoral history, the most dangerous journey in an election begins after the voter casts the ballot.

He said ballots may be counted and result sheets signed openly at the polling unit in the presence of voters and party agents, but the physical movement of results through ward, local government and state collation centres had historically created vulnerabilities to alteration, substitution, mutilation and outright fabrication.

“Judicial records and successive national electoral reform interventions like the Babalakin Commission of Inquiry into the affairs of the Federal Electoral Commission (1986), the Uwais Electoral Reform Committee (2008) and the Nnamani Committee on Constitution and Electoral Reform (2017) converge on a single diagnosis: election results manipulation has been embedded in the pathology of Nigeria’s electoral politics.

“The enduring challenge, therefore, has been how to protect the integrity of polling-unit results throughout their journey to final declaration,” Itodo said.

He noted that IReV was conceived as a solution to the perennial problem of election results manipulation, saying that under the system, polling officials use the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) to capture images of completed polling-unit result sheets and transmit them to IReV, creating a publicly accessible record against which subsequent collation can be scrutinised.

“Between 2022 and the 2023 general election, IReV earned its reputation as an electoral game-changer. Beyond making polling-unit results publicly accessible, the platform introduced an additional layer of transparency and auditability into the results-management process, thereby constraining opportunities for compromised election officials to alter results during collation,” Itodo said.

The Yiaga Africa boss stated that IReV also strengthened INEC’s institutional capacity to resist political pressure aimed at manipulating or suppressing results, but the 2023 general election marked a significant rupture in this trajectory.

“The failure to upload presidential polling-unit results as expected became one of the defining controversies of the election, severely damaging public confidence in a technology that had come to symbolise transparency and integrity in results management.

“The 2026 Osun governorship election, however, presents a different story. IReV was not without operational shortcomings, and important questions remain regarding the transmission protocols, BVAS operating system, data synchronisation, system resilience, etc.

“Nevertheless, the Osun experience reaffirmed the value of electronic transmission and real-time public access to polling-unit results as safeguards against manipulation and as mechanisms for strengthening transparency, auditability and citizen oversight.

“After the crisis of confidence that followed the 2023 general election, IReV appears to be reclaiming its place as a consequential game-changer in Nigeria’s electoral architecture,” he noted.

Itodo explained that IReV did not emerge from nowhere, but was an INEC innovation aimed at leveraging technology to reduce human interference in results management, which had been rapidly expanded.

According to him, the most consequential change is the amendment to Section 60(3) of the Electoral Act 2026, which gives legal recognition to IReV and makes electronic transmission of results compulsory.

“The operational reform included INEC’s introduction of the electronic EC8A (e-EC8A) on the BVAS through its Regulations and Guidelines. Under the process, polling officials first use the BVAS to capture an image of the physical Form EC8A before entering the results into its electronic version.

“The polling official must then confirm that the figures entered electronically correspond with those on the physical result sheet. Where the figures do not tally, the BVAS rejects the entry and prevents transmission. According to INEC, this validation mechanism is designed to prevent the transmission of result sheets containing discrepancies or data-entry errors,” Itodo added.

He said the Osun election demonstrated the value of combining electronic transmission with independent verification, adding that citizens and multiple monitoring platforms could track, aggregate and analyse polling-unit results in near real time.

Itodo, however, maintained that the real test would come in 2027, when IReV must operate nationwide under far greater political, technological and operational pressure.

“Undoubtedly, IReV reclaimed its game-changer status in Osun because law, technology and citizen oversight converged: the Electoral Act 2026 strengthened its legal foundation, citizens used it to scrutinise results, and independent verification reinforced its credibility.

“Remove any of these pillars and IReV risks becoming merely a website. In 2027, it must prove that the game has permanently changed,” he added.