Former Vice President and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, Atiku Abubakar, has raised concerns over the use of what he described as an outdated operating system on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, warning that the development could pose serious cybersecurity and operational risks to Nigeria’s electoral process ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Atiku, in a statement issued by his media office on Tuesday, said the reported failures recorded during the Osun State mock accreditation exercise on August 1, 2026, coupled with comments by the Independent National Electoral Commission’s Director of ICT, Dr Lawrence Bayode, had exposed what he described as inadequacies in the BVAS technology.
Bayode had disclosed during an appearance on Arise TV on Monday that BVAS, introduced into Nigeria’s electoral process in 2021, was currently running on Android version 10. Atiku, however, noted that the operating system reached its end of life in 2023 and no longer receives regular security updates or patches.
The ADC presidential candidate questioned why INEC, which he said has a substantial budget, had not updated the BVAS software ahead of the 2027 elections or used the forthcoming off-season elections, including the Osun governorship poll, to test an upgraded system. He described the continued use of the outdated platform as suspicious and alleged that it could undermine the integrity of future elections.
According to Atiku, an outdated operating system could expose BVAS devices to cyberattacks, potentially allowing malicious actors to gain unauthorised access to stored voter or polling-unit data. He also raised concerns over the transmission of election results through public telecommunications networks, warning that weaknesses in outdated security systems could increase the risk of data interception or manipulation.
He further expressed concern over the biometric functions of BVAS, which use fingerprint and facial recognition, arguing that an outdated technological framework could affect the accuracy and resilience of the system against attempts to circumvent biometric authentication.
Atiku also warned that software bugs and memory-related problems in legacy systems could cause BVAS applications to crash during periods of heavy usage, resulting in delayed accreditation and other technical difficulties. He consequently backed calls by cybersecurity experts for an independent and comprehensive audit of the BVAS hardware, software and source code ahead of the 2027 elections.
“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,” he said.
