The African Democratic Congress on Thursday raised the alarm over what it described as “statistically implausible” figures in the first permanent voter card pre-registration report recently released by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
The coalition’s reaction came days after the electoral body published the report of online pre-registration of Nigerian voters based on gender, state, occupation and disability.
In a statement signed by its national publicity secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, the party alleged anomalies in the report, stating that the figures were unusual.
The party said, “The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has viewed the first set of data released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on new Permanent Voter Card (PVC) pre-registrations with great concern. 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.”
The party said the numbers from Osun State alone defied both historical patterns and demographic realities, raising suspicion over the new 400,000 registrations reportedly completed in seven days.
“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 statement said.
Alleging irregularities in the registrations recorded in the South-West and the South-East, the party noted, “The anomalies became even more glaring when viewed in the context of the overall registration report.’’
It added that the figures were suggestive of manipulation by the electoral body
The ADC stated, “Across the six geopolitical zones, the South-West alone accounts for 848,359 pre-registrations, an astonishing 67 per cent 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 party charged INEC to conduct and publish rigorous and transparent forensic audit of the report, urging opposition parties to demand clarity and accountability from the electoral body.
“The ADC therefore calls on 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.
“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,” the party stated.
