ADC Presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar
Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has raised concerns over the use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), warning that the technology powering Nigeria’s elections is outdated and poses serious cyber and operational risks ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Atiku’s concerns followed the August 1, 2026 mock accreditation exercise in Osun State and comments by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Director of ICT, Dr. Lawrence Bayode, who disclosed during an interview on Arise TV on Monday that the BVAS, first introduced for elections in 2021, currently runs on Android 10.
However, Atiku noted that Android 10 reached its end of life in 2023 and no longer receives software updates or security patches, arguing that deploying a critical election technology on such an outdated operating system exposes the electoral process to significant cyber and operational vulnerabilities.
He wonders why INEC with its humongous budget cannot update the BVAS software long before the 2027 general elections or even before the series of off season elections like the Osun State governorship election during which the updated version would have been test run.
Atiku said that the nonchalant attitude of handling the BVAS issue is suspicious and a deliberate attempt to subvert the integrity of the country’s elections.
According to him, this vulnerability could allow criminal elements or hackers to bypass the BVAS application entirely, gain root access to the device file system, and potentially alter cached voter logs or polling unit result files before they are transmitted.
He noted that since BVAS machines must necessarily transmit polling unit results over weak public telecommunication networks to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal, outdated cryptographic foundations elevate the risk of Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, where sophisticated actors could intercept, block, or manipulate data packets over the air.
The former Vice President pointed out that because BVAS handles both fingerprint and facial recognition, an outdated biometric framework (such as INEC is still using), has the potential of “reducing the system’s accuracy and resilience against spoofing methods such as fingerprint and photo bypasses.”
He expressed deep concern that “bugs or memory leaks within legacy system frameworks can cause the app to crash during peak voting hours —leading to “technical glitches” and delayed accreditations as have been witnessed in the past.”
He supported the position of cybersecurity expnoerts that “running critical national infrastructure on an end-of-life operating system creates a broad attack surface. To safeguard election integrity, it is vital to perform an independent, comprehensive code and hardware audit of the BVAS devices.”
