The Electoral Act says transmit electronically. Then it says manual beats digital when things "fail."

Nigeria passed a new Electoral Act on February 18. President Tinubu signed it. And if you read the press releases, it sounds like genuine progress: mandatory electronic transmission of results, digital membership registers, no more delegate bribery in primaries, a dedicated INEC funding window. The 2027 elections will be cleaner, more transparent, harder to manipulate.

Read the actual sections.

Section 60(3) mandates electronic transmission of polling unit results to INEC's result portal. That's the reform. Then comes the proviso: where transmission fails "as a result of communication failure," the manually completed paper form takes precedence. The Act doesn't define what counts as a communication failure. Not anywhere. No definition of complete network absence versus intermittent connection versus deliberate interference. Which means a presiding officer in a disputed ward can invoke "communication failure" and hand-count in exactly the same grey zone that produced the contested results of 2023.

Section 77 requires every political party to maintain a digital NIN-linked membership register, submitted to INEC at least 21 days before any primary. Only members on that register can vote or contest. On paper, that ends the practice of delegates being bribed to choose candidates. In practice, whoever controls the database controls the primary. Party factional wars, which have always been about access and resources, will now also be fought over who gets added to the membership register and who gets left off.

Section 88(4) bars courts from stopping elections or primaries. Any pre-election challenge must be resolved after the vote. Which means by the time a court rules that something was wrong, the wrong thing has already determined the result.

Peter Obi registered with the ADC this month and announced he'll challenge the Act in court. Under the same Act, that challenge will be heard after the 2027 election. The opposition parties who gathered to condemn the law are also quietly moving to comply with it, because the alternative is not fielding candidates at all.

The law has democratic language. The loopholes are doing different work. And the 2027 election will be run on this framework, with all its ambiguities intact.