2027: Atiku raises concern over outdated INEC’s BVAS

Former Vice President and African Democratic Congress (ADC) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has warned that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) is running on an outdated Android 10 operating system, posing severe cybersecurity and operational risks for the 2027 general elections.

Atiku raised the concerns following reported failures during the Osun State mock accreditation exercise on August 1, 2026, and comments by the Independent National Electoral Commission’s Director of ICT, Dr Lawrence Bayode.

Bayode reportedly disclosed during an interview on Arise TV on Monday that BVAS, introduced into Nigeria’s electoral process in 2021, currently runs on Android 10.

In a statement issued by his Media Office in Abuja on Tuesday, Atiku said Android 10 reached end-of-life status in 2023 and no longer receives regular security updates and patches.

He questioned why INEC had not upgraded the BVAS operating system ahead of the 2027 elections, particularly given the commission’s budget and the opportunity provided by forthcoming off-cycle elections to test an updated system.

Atiku described what he called INEC’s handling of the BVAS issue as “suspicious” and alleged that it could undermine the integrity of the country’s elections.

According to him, vulnerabilities in an outdated operating system could potentially be exploited by cybercriminals to gain unauthorised access to devices and tamper with stored voter accreditation or polling unit result data before transmission.

The former vice president also raised concerns about the transmission of polling unit results over public telecommunications networks to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal.

He said outdated security and cryptographic components could increase exposure to cyber threats, including attempts to intercept, block or manipulate data transmitted between polling units and the result-viewing platform.

The ADC presidential candidate further expressed concern about the biometric functions of BVAS, which uses fingerprint and facial recognition for voter accreditation.

He argued that an outdated biometric framework could affect the system’s accuracy and resilience against attempts to circumvent its verification processes.

Atiku also warned that software defects associated with legacy systems could lead to application crashes, particularly during periods of heavy usage, potentially causing delays in voter accreditation.

He said he supported calls by cybersecurity experts for an independent and comprehensive audit of the BVAS hardware and software ahead of the 2027 elections.

According to him, running critical national infrastructure on an end-of-life operating system could create an expanded attack surface and expose the electoral system to avoidable risks.

𝕤𝕖𝕖 𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕖/𝕨𝕒𝕥𝕔𝕙 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕧𝕚𝕕𝕖𝕠 𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕖