NBA Election: Presidential candidate Demands Suspension Over Alleged Technical, Security Breaches

One of the presidential candidates in the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) election, Lateef Akangbe, has called for the immediate suspension of the ongoing poll, alleging that technical failures and security breaches have compromised the integrity and credibility of the exercise.

Electronic voting in the NBA national election commenced at midnight on Saturday, July 18, with results expected on Sunday.

In a protest letter addressed to the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA), Akangbe claimed the election experienced what he described as a “catastrophic structural and technical collapse” less than three hours after voting began.

He urged the committee to suspend the election, preserve all votes already cast, commission an independent audit of the electronic voting platform and postpone the exercise until the identified problems are resolved.

Akangbe alleged that the voting portal became inaccessible to most of the about 82,000 accredited voters by 2:09 a.m., with users reportedly encountering authentication failures, error messages and repeated timeouts.

He also questioned reports suggesting that votes cast before the outage would be cancelled and the process restarted, saying such a move would undermine confidence in 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?”

According to him, the ECNBA could no longer assure members of a credible election after the reported failure of the voting infrastructure.

“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.

Akangbe also accused the ECNBA of violating its revised electronic voting guidelines by allegedly sending one-time passwords (OTPs) through email instead of SMS.

He said the committee had informed members less than 24 hours before the election that authentication codes would be delivered “strictly via SMS to registered mobile number” in response to concerns over email-based manipulation in previous NBA elections.

However, he alleged that shortly after voting commenced, several voters began receiving OTPs through email.

“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 senior lawyer further alleged that the electronic ballot displayed the photograph of only one of the three cleared presidential candidates, while the photographs of the other two candidates, including his, were either omitted or failed to load.

He argued that the omission created an unfair visual advantage and raised concerns over whether the voting platform had been properly tested before deployment.

“A ballot that displays one candidate’s photograph while omitting the others is not a neutral instrument,” he said.

Akangbe maintained that the election should not continue until all technical and security concerns have been addressed.

He warned that proceeding with the exercise 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.”

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