Dino Melaye: Nigeria Must Learn From Brazil Elections

Senator Dino Melaye, Esq., has called on Nigeria to study Brazil’s just-concluded first round of presidential voting, arguing that the South American country has demonstrated how technology, transparency and a publicly traceable results system can reduce uncertainty around election outcomes.

Brazil went to the polls on Sunday, October 4, 2026, in a closely contested presidential election involving more than 158 million registered voters across one of the world’s largest democracies.

Official results from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court showed that Flávio Bolsonaro finished first with 47.03 per cent of valid votes, while incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva secured 45.16 per cent. Neither crossed the 50 per cent threshold required for a first-round victory, sending the contest to a runoff scheduled for October 25.

With 99.99 per cent of polling sections counted shortly after midnight, the difference between the two leading candidates stood at less than two percentage points — one of the narrowest first-round margins of Brazil’s modern democratic era.

For Melaye, however, the bigger lesson for Nigeria is not who won the first round.

It is how the votes were counted, transmitted, aggregated and made available to the public.

In a statement titled “Nigeria Should Learn From Brazil Just-Concluded Election,” the former Kogi West Senator said Nigeria must move beyond an electoral culture in which national results are slowly aggregated through multiple layers of physical collation before citizens can know the outcome.

“Brazil has roughly the population of Nigeria. On Sunday, it voted for a president across a country bigger than the size of Nigeria, and by nightfall the world knew the outcome,” Melaye said.

Brazil and Nigeria are not identical electorally, and Brazil is substantially larger geographically. But the comparison highlights the scale of Brazil’s exercise: its electoral authorities describe the country as operating the world’s largest fully computerised election system, with more than 158 million voters and results ordinarily available on election day.

Melaye argues that Nigeria should take seriously what that capacity means for electoral credibility.

“That is what a trusted system does: it makes the contest about the candidates and not about the counting.”

Brazil’s election was not completely free of technical difficulty. A temporary interruption affected the public display of national results for about 50 minutes on election night. Brazil’s electoral authority said the problem affected only the online presentation of results and did not interfere with vote counting or totalisation.

For Melaye, that distinction strengthens rather than weakens the central argument: technology should operate within an electoral system whose underlying records remain available for scrutiny.

‘Every Handoff Is a Chance for a Number to Change’

Turning specifically to Nigeria, Melaye questioned the continued dependence on prolonged multi-stage collation.

“What we see with Nigeria’s election is entirely different. Slow manual aggregation, state by state, which has become like a family tradition we can’t do away with.”

He continued:

“This is a problem, because every handoff is a chance for a number to change quietly.”

Nigeria’s electoral system already deploys technology at important stages, including voter accreditation through the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, and the electronic transmission or upload of polling-unit result images to the INEC Results Viewing Portal.

But disputes following recent elections have repeatedly raised questions about transmission, collation and the legal relationship between electronically available polling-unit records and formally declared results.

Melaye says the next reform should therefore go beyond merely introducing additional devices.

“INEC, the lesson is not about technology for its own sake.”

His proposal is an electoral architecture in which results become publicly traceable from the smallest voting unit upward.

“Results should flow from the polling unit straight to the public, so any citizen can compare what was posted at their unit with what is declared.”

That, Melaye argues, would allow Nigerians to follow an election through every layer of aggregation rather than wait for a final announcement before discovering how millions of votes were assembled.

‘INEC Chairman Should Not Be the Human Interface’

One of Melaye’s strongest recommendations concerns the traditional national collation process.

He argues that the credibility of an election should not depend on citizens sitting through a lengthy central announcement ceremony while waiting for state results to be presented one after another.

“INEC Chairman should not have to become the human interface between Nigerians and their election.”

Instead, he wants INEC to establish a comprehensive official results platform through which citizens can follow aggregation in real time.

In Melaye’s proposed model, the public should be able to see:

Polling Unit 001 — result published.
Polling Unit 002 — result published.
Polling Unit 003 — result published.

From there, the same records would move transparently through ward, local government, constituency, state and national aggregation.

The point, he stresses, is not that Nigerians should simply trust software.

It is the opposite.

“Not because Nigerians blindly trust the software, but because the underlying records are available for authorised observers, political parties, courts and citizens to scrutinise.”

Brazil already makes election totalisation available through an official results website and mobile applications, allowing the public to monitor counting as results are processed.

That public visibility is central to Melaye’s argument.

An election system should not ask citizens to choose between trusting machines and trusting officials. Instead, he says, it should generate an audit trail capable of being checked independently.

Electoral Transparency Could Also Reshape Election Litigation

Melaye also identifies another potential benefit: post-election litigation.

Nigeria’s courts routinely handle disputes concerning polling-unit results, accreditation figures, collation sheets and allegations that figures changed somewhere between voting and final declaration.

A fully traceable results architecture, Melaye argues, could make those disputes easier to interrogate.

Where every level of aggregation is linked to the underlying polling-unit records, political parties and courts would have a clearer evidential path for identifying precisely where disputed figures emerged.

That would not eliminate election petitions.

It could, however, change what must be proved.

Instead of litigants attempting to reconstruct an election months later from conflicting documents, a properly designed public audit trail could preserve a contemporaneous electoral record from polling unit to national declaration.

Brazil’s Technology Was Built Over Decades

Brazil’s current system was not created overnight.

Electronic voting machines were first introduced in Brazilian municipal elections in 1996, and the country has spent three decades developing its electronic voting infrastructure.

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court says the system was designed to combine speed with security, transparency and auditability and has enabled results to be known on the same day as voting.

The October 4 election demonstrated that scale again.

More than 125 million valid presidential votes were processed, with Bolsonaro receiving about 56.1 million and Lula approximately 53.9 million.

The political battle continues into the second round.

But Melaye’s concern is with what happens before politics becomes litigation.

He argues that Nigeria should build an electoral system in which disputes are centred on voters’ political choices rather than uncertainty over how their votes moved through the collation chain.

“Speed matters, but what matters more is that the numbers can be traced.”

That sentence goes to the heart of his proposal.

The objective, in Melaye’s view, should not simply be to announce results more quickly.

Nigeria needs a system in which a result announced nationally can be traced backwards — through the state, local government, ward and polling unit — until citizens can see the original electoral record from which the figure came.

Brazil remains a developing democracy with its own political divisions and electoral controversies.

But for Melaye, its latest election presents Nigeria with a practical question that cannot indefinitely be answered by reference to population or geography.

“Brazil is still called ‘developing,’ yet it has just shown us that the size of a country is not an excuse for the size of its electoral problems.”

His prescription for INEC is therefore straightforward: use technology not simply to conduct elections, but to make every vote traceable.

Because for Melaye, an election gains legitimacy not merely when officials announce a winner, but when citizens can independently see how the winner emerged.