After a long day of voting, the exercise came to an end at a polling unit in Gwarinpa, an estate in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, at 2:30 p.m. Or so voters thought. Electoral officers began to tally the votes and input the numbers into a web-based, centralized election results viewing portal. But what was supposed to be a relatively straight-forward process stretched on until it was nearly midnight.

Several voters had waited to ensure that the process — a digitized election tally, the first to be used in a nationwide election in Nigeria’s history — was complete and sound. After hours of waiting, their patience evaporated. Some began to accuse the officers of sabotage. 

“The e-transmission application was not properly configured on the device, so we could not upload the [tally],” said Bolaji Abdulganiyu, one of the officers on duty. The small team at the polling unit was unable to transmit the votes through the digitized system, as stipulated by the Independent National Election Commission’s new and highly-touted guidelines. Instead, they had to carry the sheets to the election commission’s IT center by hand.

Abdulganiyu was expecting the new voting and identity verification system to work better. “We were very confident because we had training,” he said. “It worked perfectly.” But when the votes actually began coming in, the system began to crash under their weight.