From Ndubuisi Orji, Abuja
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has raised concerns over alleged “statistically implausible” figures released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in its first-week report on the ongoing Continuous Voter registration (CVR).
The ADC, in a statement by its Interim National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, said the figure credited to Osun State, in the INEC report, defies
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“historical patterns” as well as “demographic realities.’
The party noted that the report by the electoral body indicated that Osun State recorded 393,269 pre-registrations in seven days. The ADC said the implication is that Osun State has more people registering in seven days than it had between 2019 and 2023.
The opposition party, while calling for a forensic audit of the first week pre-registration data, said it was curious that the South West accounted for 67 percent of all pre-registrations nationwide.
“According to INEC’s figures, Osun State alone recorded 393,269 pre-registrations in just one week. To put this in context, Osun added only 275,815 new voters between 2019 and 2023, a period of four years. In other words, Osun has now supposedly registered more people in seven days than it managed to do in an entire electoral cycle of four years.
“Even at its highest point of political mobilisation in 2022, Osun has never produced more than 823,124 votes cast in the governorship election. Now, by some miracle, nearly 20 percent of all eligible adults in the state have rushed to register. This is not just unusual, it is statistically implausible.
“The anomalies become even more glaring when viewed in the context of the overall registration report. Across the six geopolitical zones, the South West alone accounts for 848,359 pre-registrations, an astonishing 67 percent of the national total.
“By contrast, the entire South East recorded just 1,998 pre-registrations. To further illustrate, three states – Osun, Lagos, and Ogun – make up 54.2 percent of all pre-registrations in Nigeria, while five states combined – Ebonyi, Imo, Enugu, Abia, and Adamawa – barely recorded 4,153, or 0.2 percent, while the entire North East recorded just 6.1 percent.
“These fantastic figures suggest either another technical “glitch” in INEC’s digital registration system, or a more troubling possibility of deliberate manipulation of data to lay the ground for a more sinister agenda in the coming elections. In either case, INEC has some explanations to give,” the ADC stated.
It argued that the voter register is the foundation of the electoral process, stating that if the foundation is compromised, the integrity of elections would become questionable.
Therefore, the ADC implored” INEC to urgently conduct and publish a full forensic audit of the first-week pre-registration data, with a state-by-state breakdown of both physical and online registrations. INEC should also disclose the server logs, bandwidth distribution, and regional access reports for the registration portal during this period.”
The party added, “We call on all opposition political parties to set aside rivalry and jointly demand clarity from INEC on these glaring anomalies. We urge election monitoring groups, fact-checking organisations, and legal advocacy bodies to independently interrogate these numbers and press for accountability.
“We also invite our partners in the international community – the United Nations, the African Union, ECOWAS, and Nigeria’s democratic allies – to take early interest in these developments, as the credibility of the 2027 elections begins with the integrity of this voter register.
“The credibility of our democracy cannot be left to chance. Silence in the face of these anomalies would amount to complicity. The ADC believes Nigerians deserve an explanation, and we will continue to insist that INEC provides one.”
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