Beyond The Ballot: Why Do We Trust Computers For Exams But Not For Elections? –By Muhammad Bashir Abdulhafiz

I am part of what the newspapers call the ‘Demographic Dividend’. I am young, I am Nigerian, and I am tired. I am tired of explaining to my friends in the diaspora that our country is not just a collection of viral videos about failed infrastructure and political drama. I am also part of a generation that has never known a world without the internet. We do our banking on Moniepoint. We order food on Chowdeck. And crucially, we secure our future education through a Computer Based Test.

Every year, over 1.5 million Nigerian teenagers sit in front of computer screens, sweating under the glare of a fluorescent bulb. We call it Computer Based Test (CBT). For those few hours in a JAMB hall, Nigeria works. This is the irony that keeps me up at night. It is the irony I want to lay bare on this page: Nigeria trusts a teenager with a biometric scanner for a four hour exam, but it does not trust the Nigerian electorate with a biometric scanner for a four minute vote.

If you have never sat for JAMB mock exam recently, let me paint you a picture of modern Nigeria. You arrive at the gate. An official with a tablet scans your face. The system confirms your registration number, your date of birth, and the exact subject combination you are supposed to write. You walk in. The hall is quiet save for the hum of inverters and the clicking of mice. You log in. Your name and photo are already on the desktop. You write the exam. You click ‘Submit’. Then wait for 24 hours for your score. There is no ‘result is coming’ after two weeks. There is no ‘we are experiencing technical difficulties at the collation centre’. It is fast, it is fair, and it is online. The computer does not know you are from a ‘connected family’. It does not care that your uncle is a Commissioner. It sees only data. Right answer, one point. Wrong answer, zero. This is not a miracle. It is just basic programming. It is a system designed to eliminate human interest because, in the context of JAMB, human interest was the virus.

Now, compare that to the day we choose a President or a Governor. We leave our phones at home and trek to a polling unit. We dip a thumb in a pot of ink like we are in 1963. We press a thumbprint on a piece of paper, fold it like a love letter in secondary school, and drop it in a plastic bucket. Before CBT, the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination was a festival of ‘miracle centers’, leaked question papers, and invigilators reading answers aloud in pidgin English. We fixed it. Not because we became more honest overnight, but because we removed the human interest from the chain of custody. We gave the job to the server.

Now, let us walk down the road to the 2023 General Elections or the off-cycle elections in Edo and Ondo. We were promised technology. We got the BVAS (Bimodal Voter Accreditation System). It worked beautifully at the polling unit. Voters face was scanned, and the fingerprint matched. You voted. And then… silence. The law says results must be transmitted electronically. But when the sun set on Election Day, the ‘IReV Portal’ (INEC Result Viewing Portal) behaved like a stubborn generator, it refused to pick load. Results from the polling units, which had been captured on the BVAS machines, simply refused to travel to the central server. They had to be ‘manually’ brought to the collation center. And in that long, dark, dusty road between the Polling Unit and the LGA Secretariat, something terrible happened. The human element manipulate everything.

We went from a clean, digital, biometric process in the morning, to a messy, analogue, manual process by midnight. Why? The official reason is always ‘network glitch’. With due respect, that is an insult to the intelligence of every Nigerian teenager who has ever streamed a football match on their phone in the same village where INEC claims there is no network. The truth is not technical, it is political. An election result that is transmitted instantly is an election result that cannot be negotiated. You cannot call a server in the cloud and say: ‘Oga server, make we balance this figures small, na just 2,000 votes’. A server does not attend emergency meetings in the Governor’s Lodge.

There is a popular defense used whenever young people like me demand full electronic transmission and online voting. I have heard the elders say: ‘Ah, but not everyone is educated like you. How will Mallam in the village use a computer?’ My response is simple: We are not asking Mallam to type a 10,000 word thesis on Goodluck Jonathan’s legacy. We are asking him to press a button with a picture of a broom or an umbrella. We are asking him to do exactly what he does when he collects his BVN at the bank. If a grandmother who cannot write a sentence in English can use her PIN to collect N5,000 from a POS agent in the market, she can use her thumbprint to choose her Councillor. She knows not to share her BVN. She knows that if the network is down, his money is stuck.

If we can design a POS interface that is intuitive enough for the least literate Nigerian to receive a cash transfer, we can design a voting interface that is just pictures. A ballot paper on a screen with party logos: Umbrella, Broom, Wheelbarrow among others. Touch the picture. Confirm with your thumb. Done. The resistance to online voting is not about protecting the illiterate voter. It is about protecting the illiterate rigger. It is about protecting a political class that has perfected the dark art of manipulating the gap between when a vote is cast and when it is announced.

Advice to Those in Authority.
To the Chairman of INEC, the National Assembly, and the Presidency: The young people of this country are watching. We are the ones who will either stay here and build this nation or flee through the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. Our patience is thinner than a recharge card voucher. I am not writing this to complain. I am writing this as a citizen offering a free consultancy service to the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Here is how we get from the Chaos of Collation to the Sanity of the Server.
Firstly, audit the ‘network’ excuse. Before we talk about full online voting, let us fix the transmission we already have by law. INEC should be forced to publish a detailed network coverage map of every polling unit in Nigeria. Where there is truly no network, we should use Satellite Broadband. Starlink and similar services are now in Nigeria. A ballot result is a few kilobytes of text. It is lighter than a WhatsApp message. The technology exists. The budget exists. What is lacking is the political will to have an incontestable result.

Secondly, pilot online voting for the youth corps and diaspora. We have over 300,000 NYSC members deployed annually. We have a massive diaspora remitting billions. Let these groups vote online as a pilot scheme. If it works for a few million educated and tech-savvy citizens, we can scale it down to the local level. This would reduce the pressure on our polling units and prove to the claims that the sky will not fall.

Thirdly, decriminalize electronic transmission by making it lawful and mandatory. Section 50(2) of the Electoral Act allows for electronic transmission, but it is often treated as a suggestion. We need an amendment that states: ‘The manual collation of results is hereby abolished. Once the BVAS produces the result sheet at the Polling Unit, it shall be signed digitally and uploaded instantly to a public blockchain ledger’. Blockchain is not just for Bitcoin, it is for trust. You cannot alter a block without everyone seeing it.

Lastly, protect the whistleblowers and tech staffs. Too often, the young ICT officers hired by INEC are the first casualties of this rigging machinery. They are pressured to ‘forget’ the password to the portal. We need a Whistleblower Protection Law specifically for electoral technology. Anyone who attempts to sabotage the server should face the same penalties as someone who attempts to sabotage the Central Bank of Nigeria.

We are the generation of the CBT. We understand that technology is not magic, it is a mirror. It shows us exactly who we are. A CBT result shows a student exactly how much they know. An electronic election result would show a politician exactly how much the people trust them. To those in authority, the young man or woman who just scored 300 in JAMB using a computer is not going to accept that the same computer cannot count votes for a Local Government Chairman. But remember, we must stop acting as if free and fair elections are a luxury Nigeria cannot afford. They are not a luxury, they are the only foundation upon which Good Governance can stand. Fix the vote, and you fix the country. Until then, we will keep getting the same results, both in the ballot box and in the lives of the common man.

Muhammad Bashir Abdulhafiz wrote from Jos, and can be reached via abdulhafizmuhammad81@gmail.com instantly.