When someone says, “Even America has election glitches,” they’re either being dishonest or deliberately missing the point. Comparing a temporary malfunction in a few polling machines in Cumberland County, New Jersey, to the nationwide collapse of Nigeria’s INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal during the 2023 presidential election is like comparing a traffic light outage to a total national blackout. The difference isn’t just technical — it’s moral, systemic, and cultural.
In the U.S., when a county reports a glitch, officials respond immediately. During the 2024 local elections in New Jersey, a few voting machines and electronic poll books experienced temporary breakdowns in Cumberland County. Election officers swiftly switched to verified paper backups, voters continued casting ballots, and the system recorded every vote transparently. The issue affected only a handful of polling stations and was resolved within hours. Officials gave public briefings, investigations were launched, and accountability was visible — no drama, no conspiracy, no excuses. The integrity of the election remained intact.
Now contrast that with Nigeria’s 2023 elections. INEC’s IReV server — the core platform meant to upload and display real-time polling unit results — failed spectacularly nationwide at the most crucial moment. According to INEC’s own post-election technical report (June 2023), the upload of presidential results from over 176,000 polling units was “unexpectedly slow” due to “technical glitches.” That “glitch” paralyzed transparency for hours, allowing suspicion, misinformation, and political manipulation to spread like wildfire. Days later, the public trust deficit had deepened, and the election’s credibility was in tatters.
The difference between the American response and the Nigerian excuse is the difference between systems and syndromes. A system identifies, isolates, and corrects a problem transparently. A syndrome hides, denies, and politicizes it. In the U.S., elections are decentralized, audited, and backed by state laws ensuring redundancy — paper ballots, cross-verifiable tallies, and mandatory recounts where necessary. In Nigeria, elections are centralized, opaque, and over-dependent on one national server that too often becomes a black hole when accountability is most needed.
Let’s face it: the American glitch was a technical hiccup; the Nigerian one was a systemic meltdown. The U.S. has mechanisms that ensure local failures don’t spiral into national crises. Nigeria has a tradition of turning preventable failures into endless political drama. When America experiences glitches, they fix them with urgency and transparency; when Nigeria does, we excuse them with “technical issues” and move on as if nothing happened.
That’s why the Nigerian electorate reacts with cynicism — because we’ve seen this movie too many times. Billions are budgeted for “election technology,” yet INEC still struggles with basic result uploads. According to BudgIT (2024), INEC’s 2023 election budget exceeded ₦305 billion — the most expensive election in Africa’s history — yet its key transparency mechanism collapsed under the weight of poor planning and weak accountability. Meanwhile, in the U.S., local counties with modest budgets manage to conduct elections with paper backups, independent audits, and instant technical interventions that preserve voter confidence.
Nigeria’s real problem isn’t technology — it’s the leadership culture that refuses to own up to failure. America fixes; Nigeria deflects. America’s system assumes failure will occur and prepares backups; Nigeria’s syndrome assumes divine perfection and collapses when it doesn’t happen.
Until INEC and the political class accept that credibility, not convenience, is the true test of democracy, no amount of “glitch” explanations will restore public faith. The day Nigerians stop excusing incompetence as fate, and start demanding accountability like citizens — not subjects — is the day we’ll finally earn the right to say, our system works.
Because let’s be honest — when America’s election machines blink, they fix the circuit; when Nigeria’s server blinks, we kill the truth and bury the evidence.
