Tinubu signed the Electoral Act. He kept the clause that lets humans change them.

Tinubu signed the Electoral Act 2026 on Wednesday, the same day el-Rufai was being passed between agencies and the day before FCT council elections.

The act replaces the 2022 version and governs how Nigeria runs its elections through 2027. Most of it is administrative, uncontroversial. But one clause matters more than all the others: electronic transmission of results is optional.

Mandatory real-time transmission from polling units to INEC's server is not in this law. Manual collation remains the fallback where "network failure" occurs. Civil society groups who spent weeks outside the National Assembly demanding mandatory e-transmission were told no. Tinubu signed it anyway, and stood at the ceremony to explain why. "Results," he said, "are finalised by humans, not computers."

That sentence deserves a moment.

In 2023, INEC's Results Viewing Portal failed on election night. Results that were supposed to upload in real time didn't. The official collation then proceeded manually. Petitions followed. Courts spent months sorting through what the machines didn't capture.

The 2026 act doesn't close that gap. It institutionalises it. Where transmission fails, manually completed EC8A forms become the primary basis for results. The same forms that election petition lawyers have spent years arguing over.

The FCT council election on Saturday will be the first test of the new law's environment, even if the law itself is aimed at 2027. Watch whether results upload to IReV in real time or whether the manual fallback kicks in. That will tell you something about what 2027 will look like.