By
Otunba (Dr.) Abdulfalil Abayomi Odunowo
Nigeria’s recurring electoral crisis is not fundamentally about BVAS devices, acronyms, or procedures. It is about trust. Every election cycle, Nigerians are promised credibility through reforms first ballot boxes, then card readers, now BVAS. Yet public confidence remains fragile, as evidenced by the staggering number of post-election disputes: between 2007 and 2019 alone, 3,479 petitions were filed across four election cycles , and in 2023, 1,209 petitions were lodged following the general elections, with over 1,000 proceeding to tribunals . The question before us is therefore not whether Option A4 or BVAS is more fashionable, but which system best restores belief in the people’s will.
Option A4, the open ballot system, remains one of the most controversial yet misunderstood chapters in Nigeria’s electoral history. Introduced by Prof. Humphrey Nwosu, chairman of the National Electoral Commission (NEC), it was first adopted during the Third Republic for the 1993 presidential election on June 12. Under it, voters queued openly behind pictures of their preferred candidates at polling units, starting from the ward level in a bottom-up, grassroots approach, and counting was immediate and visible. Its greatest strength is radical transparency. There are no hidden ballots, no midnight collation dramas, no mysterious figures appearing at distant centers. What the people see is what they get.
This method produced what is widely regarded as Nigeria’s freest and fairest election, where Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) defeated Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC) with 58.36% of the vote, winning across ethnic and regional lines including northern, eastern, western, and south-south states demonstrating unprecedented national unity.
Tragically, the results were annulled on June 23 by military ruler General Ibrahim Babangida, citing alleged irregularities, leading to widespread unrest and over 100 deaths . Despite this, Option A4’s legacy endures as a benchmark for credibility, having eliminated common frauds like ballot stuffing and made vote-buying more difficult due to public visibility .
By contrast, the current BVAS-driven secret ballot system prioritizes voter privacy and biometric verification. Introduced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in 2023 to replace the flawed Smart Card Readers used in 2015 and 2019, BVAS employs fingerprint and facial recognition to authenticate voters and uploads polling unit results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) for public access. In theory, it is modern, secure, and inclusive, addressing issues like multiple voting and result falsification. In practice, it has become heavily dependent on technology, logistics, and human discretion at multiple stages accreditation, counting, uploading, and collation. Each stage introduces new points of failure, dispute, and litigation. For instance, during the 2023 elections, widespread technical glitches prevented real-time uploads to IReV, fueling suspicions of sabotage and eroding trust. A notable controversy arose in Osun State, where a tribunal reversed the 2022 governorship election results due to over-voting discrepancies detected via BVAS reports, reducing the winner’s votes from over 314,000 to 290,000.
Supporters of BVAS argue, correctly, that ballot secrecy protects voters from intimidation. In a country with strong local power structures, this protection matters. But secrecy alone does not guarantee credibility. When results declared do not match what voters believe occurred at polling units, secrecy quickly turns into suspicion. That is why post-election court battles have become routine, and why judicial pronouncements increasingly determine political mandates rather than the ballot itself as seen in the 88.9% failure rate of 2023 petitions analyzed by observers.
Option A4 flips this equation. It reduces technical manipulation and shortens the distance between voter choice and declared result. Vote-buying becomes harder because choices are publicly known. Ballot stuffing becomes nearly impossible. Elections become cheaper, faster, and easier to audit by ordinary citizens, as demonstrated in 1993 when the process reflected mass opinion over elite preferences.
Yet Option A4 carries its own risks. Open voting can expose citizens to coercion in areas where security is weak or political intolerance is high. Minority opinions may be suppressed if voters fear reprisals. These risks are real and cannot be dismissed. But they are not arguments against transparency; they are arguments for stronger security, civic education, and enforcement.
The deeper issue is this: Nigeria’s elections suffer less from how people vote and more from how results are handled after voting. BVAS has improved accreditation, but it has not eliminated post-poll manipulation or restored full public confidence, as the 2023 failures highlighted. Option A4, despite its age, confronts this problem directly by making the process visible from start to finish, as it did in producing a credible outcome in 1993 before annulment .
The choice before Nigeria is not binary. We do not have to choose between openness and privacy as if they are mutually exclusive. A credible path forward lies in a hybrid approach: biometric accreditation to prevent impersonation, secret ballots to protect conscience, and uncompromising public counting with immediate result display at polling units. Transparency should not end at accreditation; it must extend to results.
Ultimately, democracy survives not on gadgets but on legitimacy. Any system that consistently produces outcomes Nigerians do not believe in will fail, no matter how advanced it appears. Whether through Option A4, BVAS reform, or a thoughtful combination of both, Nigeria must return elections to their core purpose: allowing citizens to see clearly that their votes count and count exactly as cast.
Until that trust is rebuilt, no technology will save our democracy.
Otunba (Dr.) Abdulfalil Abayomi Odunowo is National President SPEAKUP Collective Nigeria
