Former Vice President, and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has raised the alarm over the continued use of an outdated operating system on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), warning that the flaw exposes Nigeria’s electoral process to serious cyber and operational risks ahead of the 2027 general elections.
His concern follows the mock-accreditation failures recorded during the Osun State exercise on August 1, 2026, and a revelation on Monday by the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Director of ICT, Dr. Lawrence Bayode, that BVAS, first deployed in Nigeria’s election in 2021, is still running on Android version 10.
Bayode did not disclose that Android version 10 reached end of life in 2023 and no longer receives updates or security patches, a detail Atiku’s camp says raises serious questions about the Commission’s handling of critical election technology.
In a statement issued by his media office in Abuja on Tuesday, Atiku said running a platform as sensitive as BVAS on an outdated operating system poses severe risks, and questioned why INEC, despite its large budget, had failed to update the software ahead of the 2027 polls or during earlier off-cycle elections such as the Osun governorship race, where an upgraded version could have been tested.
He described the Commission’s handling of the issue as nonchalant and suggested it could reflect a deliberate attempt to undermine the integrity of Nigeria’s elections.
According to Atiku, the vulnerability could allow criminal elements or hackers to bypass the BVAS application entirely, gain root access to the device’s file system, and potentially alter cached voter log or polling unit result files before transmission.
He also warned that because BVAS machines transmit polling unit results over public telecommunication networks to INEC’s Result Viewing (IReV) portal, outdated cryptographic protections increase the risk of Man-in-the-Middle attacks, in which data packets could be intercepted, blocked, or manipulated in transit.
On biometric verification, Atiku said an outdated framework could reduce the accuracy BVAS’s fingerprint and facial recognition functions and weaken its resistance to spoofing methods, including fingerprint and photo bypasses.
He further raised concern that bugs and memory leaks in the legacy system could cause the application to crash during peak voting hours, resulting in technical glitches and delayed accreditation of voters, a problem witnessed in previous elections.
Atiku aligned himself with cybersecurity experts who argued that operating critical national infrastructure on an end-of- life operating system creates a wide attack surface, and called for an independent, comprehensive code and hardware audit of BVAS devices to safeguard the integrity of future elections.
