Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has raised concerns over the alleged use of an outdated operating system on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) ahead of Saturday’s governorship election in Osun State.
The former vice-president said the reported failures recorded during the August 1, 2026 mock accreditation exercise, coupled with comments by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)’s Director of ICT, Dr Lawrence Bayode, had raised questions about the reliability and security of the technology being deployed for the election.
Speaking on Arise TV on Monday, Bayode said BVAS, which was introduced into Nigeria’s electoral process in 2021, was currently operating on Android version 10.
Reacting in a statement issued by his media office, Atiku said the INEC official had failed to disclose that the operating system was outdated.
“What the INEC ICT Director did not say, however, is that the Android version 10 is outdated as it reached end of life in 2023, meaning that it is no longer getting updates or security patches.”
Atiku argued that operating a critical electoral technology on an outdated platform could expose the system to cybersecurity and operational vulnerabilities.
He questioned why INEC, despite its budget, had not upgraded the BVAS software ahead of the 2027 general elections or tested an updated version during the series of off-cycle elections, including the Osun governorship poll.
The ADC presidential candidate described the handling of the BVAS issue as suspicious and alleged that it could undermine the integrity of Nigeria’s electoral process.
“This vulnerability could allow criminal elements or hackers to bypass the BVAS application entirely, gain root access to the device file system, and potentially alter cached voter logs or polling unit result files before they are transmitted.”
Atiku also raised concerns over the transmission of polling-unit results through public telecommunications networks to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal.
He said outdated cryptographic systems could increase the risk of cyberattacks, including attempts to intercept, block or manipulate data transmitted from polling units.
The former vice-president further expressed concerns about the biometric authentication component of BVAS, which uses fingerprint and facial recognition.
He said an outdated biometric framework could potentially affect the system’s accuracy and its ability to withstand attempts to bypass authentication.
According to him, this could result in “reducing the system’s accuracy and resilience against spoofing methods such as fingerprint and photo bypasses.”
Atiku also warned that technical problems associated with legacy systems could affect the performance of BVAS during voting.
He expressed concern that “bugs or memory leaks within legacy system frameworks can cause the app to crash during peak voting hours —leading to ‘technical glitches’ and delayed accreditations as have been witnessed in the past.”
The ADC candidate also backed calls from cybersecurity experts for a comprehensive assessment of the electoral technology ahead of the election.
He said, “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.”
