🚨 Parliament has voted to end the requirement that election results be live-streamed. What the law keeps, and what it drops, matters more than the headline suggests. This is the Elections (Amendment) Bill, now passed by both Houses of Parliament. Here is what it means. On 22 October 2026, the National Assembly passed the Bill, which the Senate had already approved. Clause 22 deletes Section 39 of the Elections Act, the provision that governs how results are transmitted, determined and declared, and with it the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission's legal duty to live-stream results. The change is aimed at the 2027 General Election. Having cleared both Houses, it now moves toward assent by the President. What is removed is narrower than it first appears, and what remains is just as important. The Commission must still determine, declare and publish results immediately after the vote. Results declared at the polling station continue to be treated as final. And the media and election observers remain free to broadcast results on their own. What goes is the specific statutory obligation on the Commission to run a live-streaming mechanism. Two legal anchors frame the debate. The first is the Constitution. Article 81 requires elections to be transparent, and Article 86 requires that results be accurate, verifiable and promptly announced. The second is the 2017 jurisprudence in which the courts held that the result recorded at the polling station, on Form 34A, is the primary and final record, and cannot be altered at a tallying centre. The Bill's retention of polling-station finality tracks that holding. The legal tension worth noting. On one side, supporters argue that live-streaming is not the only path to transparency. The duty to publish results promptly stays, the finality of the polling-station result stays, the forms remain available for scrutiny, and the media and observers can still broadcast. The Commission adds that electronic transmission with a backup is more reliable than a live feed in areas with weak network coverage, where the feed was never dependable. On the other side, critics argue that live, real-time visibility of results as they arrived was itself a safeguard, because it let the public and the media compare the running tally against the final declaration, and that removing it narrows public oversight. They also question the wisdom of changing electoral law so close to an election, a concern that saw a similar proposal rejected by a parliamentary committee in 2022. Whether the safeguards that remain deliver the same transparency the Constitution requires is the question that will follow this Bill. Key takeaway: the Bill removes the duty to live-stream, but keeps the duty to declare and publish results promptly and the finality of the polling-station result. The constitutional test is not live-streaming for its own sake, but whether the system as a whole remains accurate, verifiable and transparent under Article 86. 👉 Follow @Lexken_EMSLaw for practical legal insights on electoral law and the Constitution.