Election Administration and Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic
A Critical Review of INEC’s Electronic Innovations (1999-2023)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.27.2.1Keywords:
Electoral Integrity, Election Administration, Election Technology, Democratic Consolidation, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Institutional Trust, NigeriaAbstract
This paper examines the trajectory of electronic innovations introduced by Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) between 1999 and 2023, situating this technological journey within democratic consolidation theory and the broader literature on electoral integrity and institutional trust. Drawing on official INEC reports, legislative documents, academic literature, and election observer mission findings, the paper traces the evolution from manual voter registration in the early Fourth Republic through successive technological cycles, culminating in the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal in 2023. The paper argues that INEC's technological interventions have produced a "trust paradox": while biometric accreditation technologies have materially reduced voter impersonation and multiple voting at the polling unit level, persistent failures in electronic result transmission have generated new focal points for political contestation and public disillusionment. Rather than resolving entrenched patterns of electoral manipulation, technology has displaced them—shifting their primary site from the polling unit to the collation and transmission process. This finding extends existing frameworks on fraud displacement and sociotechnical legitimacy to the Nigerian case, and carries implications for the study of electoral technology in weakly institutionalised democracies more broadly.
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