Founder of the Nigeria Election Petition Organisation and lawyer, Ameze Belo-Osagie, has raised concerns about how Nigerian courts have handled electronic evidence in election petitions, particularly cases involving the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS.

Speaking during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, Osagie said BVAS technology should make certain electoral disputes, including allegations of overvoting, easier to establish in court.

She said petitioners could rely on BVAS accreditation records, the voter register and the number of votes recorded to demonstrate discrepancies.

“The BVAS system should make this really easy to prove in court because then you just bring the BVAS report that shows the number of accredited voters, you bring the voter’s register, who was registered to vote, and you bring the number of votes,” she said.

However, Osagie said some cases involving electronic evidence failed because, in her view, courts misinterpreted or overinterpreted a Supreme Court precedent on BVAS evidence.

“But we see a lot of these cases failing in the courts, in part because a lot of courts are, in my view, sort of misinterpreting or over-interpreting a Supreme Court precedent that required challengers to bring not just the BIVAS report, but the actual physical BIVAS machines themselves into the courtroom,” she said.

She described the treatment of electronic evidence as one of the more significant and concerning trends emerging from her research into election litigation.

Osagie’s research examined more than 3,300 election tribunal judgments spanning more than two decades and found that qualification disputes were among the most successful categories of election petitions, partly because they can be supported by documentary evidence.

She said other forms of electoral malpractice, including vote-buying and violence, are more difficult to establish because challengers must satisfy the evidential standards required by the courts.

Osagie also argued that election litigation should establish facts about what happened during an election, regardless of whether the court ultimately changes the declared result.

“The reason why we go to court, in theory, to use the popular phrase, is that regardless of who wins or loses, the court process is an engine of fact-finding,” she said.

However, she said the value of election litigation is reduced when cases are disposed of on technical grounds rather than through a detailed examination of the evidence.

Looking ahead to the 2027 elections, Osagie said pre-election litigation would be particularly important because court cases can determine who is eligible to appear on the ballot before voting begins.

She also called for greater transparency from INEC, arguing that wider disclosure of election information would allow Nigerians and litigants to better understand how results were produced.

Osagie said electoral reforms should ultimately focus on making malpractice more difficult to commit in the first place rather than relying primarily on litigation to address violations after elections. (The Sun)