Nigeria stress-tests BVAS voter devices, adds 57,000 units before 2027 polls
Africa's most populous democracy is trying to fix the tech glitches that dented trust in its 2023 vote, with a mock accreditation drill due in November.
Nigeria's election commission, INEC, has finished a six-day nationwide stress test of its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), the biometric devices used to verify voters at polling units. The exercise ran from October 23 to 28. INEC says it has also acquired 57,000 new BVAS units for the 2027 general elections.
A mock accreditation exercise will follow in November. Presidential and National Assembly elections are scheduled for January 16, 2027, with governorship and state legislature polls on February 6. INEC Chairman Prof. Joash Amupitan has said he expects the system to run with fewer glitches than before.
Here is the background. BVAS matches a voter's fingerprint or face against the register. It also photographs the polling-unit result sheet and uploads it to a public portal called IReV on voting day. INEC introduced it in 2021 to replace the smart card readers used in 2015. It was piloted in a Delta State by-election, tried in Anambra, Ekiti and Osun, and then used nationally in 2023, the election that brought President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to office.
The 2023 rollout was bumpy. Civil society group Yiaga Africa reported that BVAS malfunctioned in about 11 percent of polling units in the presidential vote. Nine percent of those were fixed on site and two percent had their devices replaced. In a pre-election mock exercise, Yiaga also found voters denied accreditation in roughly 20 percent of units because the devices could not verify their fingerprints or faces.
Observers were harsher on the consequences. The EU observer mission said BVAS and IReV failures, combined with weak transparency, badly damaged public trust. The Commonwealth Observer Group reached a similar verdict on credibility. The then information minister, Lai Mohammed, had called the technology a game changer for one of the country's most credible elections.
INEC's fix is mostly about hardware and software hygiene. Amupitan says the new units come with software hardening, battery optimisation and biometric calibration. They also carry built-in batteries, which target a known weak spot in 2023: power supply in remote communities with unreliable electricity.
Why it matters beyond Lagos and Abuja: election technology works only if voters believe in it. Any country running large-scale digital voting or verification faces the same test of ground-level reliability, from battery life to patchy connectivity. Nigeria's November mock drill will be an early read on whether the upgrades work where it counts, and an optimistic one would help rebuild confidence well before January 2027.
Source: Biometric Update