Lateef Akangbe, one of the presidential candidates in the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) election, has called for the suspension of the ongoing poll, alleging that technical failures and security breaches have compromised the integrity of the process.
E-voting in the NBA national election commenced at midnight on July 18, with results expected on Sunday.
In a protest letter addressed to the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA) on Saturday, Akangbe said the election had suffered a “catastrophic structural and technical collapse” less than three hours after voting commenced.
The senior lawyer urged the committee to halt the exercise, preserve all voting records, commission an independent audit of the platform and postpone the election until the identified issues are resolved.
Akangbe’s first complaint centred on what he described as the collapse of the electronic voting portal.
He claimed that as of 2:09 am, the platform was inaccessible to the majority of the about 82,000 accredited voters, with users reporting errors, authentication failures and timeouts.
Akangbe said reports that votes cast before the outage would be cancelled and the process restarted raised questions about the integrity of the election.
“If the portal is inaccessible to the general membership, how were any votes cast at all? Who had access to the platform during a window in which the public could not enter?” he asked.
“How can the candidates, their agents, or the membership verify that back-end ballot dumping has not already taken place during this period of total opacity?”
Akangbe argued that the committee could no longer guarantee the credibility of the process once the voting infrastructure had failed.
“A portal that collapses within the first two hours of a national election and then proposes to ‘restart’ is not a portal that can be trusted to deliver a credible result at any point thereafter,” he said.
He also accused the ECNBA of breaching its own revised electronic voting guidelines by allegedly sending one-time passwords (OTPs) through email instead of SMS.
Akangbe said the committee had, less than 24 hours earlier, announced that authentication codes would be delivered “strictly via SMS to registered mobile number” to address concerns over email-based manipulation observed in previous NBA elections.
However, he alleged that voters had begun receiving OTPs via email shortly after voting opened.
“This is not a minor technical glitch. This is a complete and bad-faith breach of the security architecture that the ECNBA itself published,” he said.
“If OTPs are being delivered via email, the entire authentication framework is compromised.”
The NBA presidential candidate alleged that the electronic ballot displayed the photograph of only one of the three cleared presidential candidates, while the photographs of the others, including his, were either omitted or failed to render.
He argued that the defect created an unfair visual advantage and called into question the adequacy of the platform’s pre-election testing and certification.
“A ballot that displays one candidate’s photograph while omitting the others is not a neutral instrument,” he said.
Akangbe demanded that the electoral committee immediately suspend the election until the issues are addressed.
He warned that proceeding with the election under the prevailing conditions would produce a result lacking legitimacy.
“A flawed, rushed election carried out today under these chaotic conditions cannot yield a credible result,” he said.
“Whoever is declared the winner of an election conducted on a collapsed portal, with breached authentication, and on a visually defective ballot, will not lead the Bar with the confidence of the profession.”