Nigeria, May 6 -- "I was so frustrated and exhausted," Josephine Ochadamu says when asked about her experiences as an Assistant Presiding Officer at a polling unit in Nasarawa State during Nigeria's 2023 elections. Connected through a mutual acquaintance, she agreed to a telephone interview to share her struggles with the new technology that was meant to deliver, in the words of the then-national electoral commission chair, the "best election ever." Through state-of-the-art machines, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was intended to upload votes directly to a connected Result Viewing Portal.

But when it came to the crucial presidential vote, it did not do so.

"The BVAS machine performed perfectly well at first," Ms Ochadamu ...