Senate backed e-transmission, then wrote in the words that make rigging legal again

Three words. That's what the Senate kept.

Where transmission fails.

Under the Electoral Act amendment passed Tuesday, presiding officers must upload polling unit results to INEC's IReV portal electronically. But where network fails, or is said to fail, the manual Form EC8A becomes the primary result. Not a backup. The primary.

You know what that phrase opens up. You watched 2023.

In that election, INEC's own results portal showed figures that didn't match what was announced at collation centres. Petitions were filed. Courts heard arguments. The Supreme Court ultimately held that the IReV portal wasn't part of the official collation process and that non-transmission alone couldn't nullify a result. That ruling is still law. And the new Electoral Act, the one that was supposed to fix all of this, just preserved the same gap.

Civil society groups aren't treating Tuesday as a win. EiE Nigeria called it "a carefully crafted loophole that legalises electoral fraud." Yiaga, the Kukah Centre, and the IPC all rejected the amendment within 24 hours of the vote. The NLC had threatened a boycott last weekend to force the Senate back into session. They got the session. They didn't get the reform.

Here's where it stands. A 12-member conference committee is now reconciling the Senate version with the House version, which had stronger language on mandatory real-time transmission. That committee is the last real opening before presidential assent. Three southern senators reportedly drove the original removal of the real-time clause during clause-by-clause consideration last week. Their names are in the Vanguard report. Worth knowing before 2027.

The Senate heard the protests. They reversed course publicly. Then they kept the three words that matter most to anyone planning to dispute a result next year.

That's not reform. That's the appearance of reform. Nigeria has a long history of telling those two things apart.