Seriake Dickson, the senator representing Bayelsa West in the National Assembly, has reiterated his support for electronic transmission of election results amid ongoing debates over the proposed Electoral Act bill.

The former Bayelsa State governor made the renewed call while speaking at a panel discussion organised by ActionAid Nigeria on electoral reform on Thursday.

During his remarks, Mr Dickson, who is one of the fierce opposition lawmakers in the Senate, expressed shock over the strong opposition against the clause to mandate real-time transmission of election results, which his colleagues in the upper chamber had earlier rejected.

“That is shocking and speaks to where we are and who we are as a country,” the lawmaker stated while voicing his concern over the hesitation to allow live electronic transmission of same election results that would be manually collated.

Mr Dickson maintained that he is a long-time advocate for full implementation of electronic voting in Nigeria, arguing that the country has “no business with excessive paperwork and manual voting.”

He, however, acknowledged that despite public demand for real-time vote monitoring, Nigeria is not fully equipped for outright electronic voting but noted that law mandating electronic transmission of Form EC8A result sheets from each polling unit to a central server must be passed instead.

Subsequently, the lawmaker called for the adoption of the House of Representatives’ version of the Electoral Act bill, which mandated simultaneously real-time electronic transmission and manual collation of election results from every polling unit.

Mr Dickson further urged the Independent National Electoral Commission to update its guidelines and regulations mandating that every polling unit result must be electronically transmitted, and that only such transmitted results should be used for collation.