A civil rights organization, Yiaga Africa, has introduced a new perspective on the general election held on February 25. The organization claims that the results from Imo and Rivers states do not align with its projections for those areas. This observation was highlighted in a post-election statement signed by Samson Itodo, Chair of Watching The Vote and Executive Director of Yiaga Africa. The statement, titled “The 2023 presidential elections are once again a missed opportunity: INEC must be fundamentally reformed,” suggests that the results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) were manipulated.
According to Yiaga Africa, the state-level presidential results for Imo and Rivers are inconsistent with their projections. For Rivers, INEC reported that the All Progressives Congress (APC) received 231,591 votes, accounting for 44.2 percent; the Labour Party (LP) received 175,071 votes or 33.4 percent; and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) garnered 88,468 votes, which is 16.9 percent. In contrast, Yiaga Africa’s estimates for Rivers indicated that the APC should have received only 21.7 percent (±5.0 percent), while the LP was projected at 50.8 percent (±10.6 percent) and the PDP at 22.2 percent (±6.5 percent).
In Imo, INEC announced that the APC received 66,406 votes, representing 14.2 percent; the LP received 360,495 votes or 77.1 percent; and the PDP obtained 30,234 votes, which is 6.5 percent. These results also diverge significantly from Yiaga Africa’s projections for Imo, which estimated the APC at 5.1 percent (±2.3 percent), the LP at 88.1 percent (±3.8 percent), and the PDP at 5.7 percent (±2.3 percent).
Based on reports from 97 percent of its sampled polling units, Yiaga Africa stated that the APC had higher vote expectations. Their statistical analysis indicated that the APC should receive between 34.4 percent and 37.4 percent of the vote, while the LP should receive between 24.2 percent and 28.4 percent. The New Nigeria Peoples Party was projected to receive between 4.6 percent and 6.4 percent, and the PDP was expected to garner between 28.3 percent and 31.1 percent. No other political party was anticipated to receive more than 0.3 percent of the vote.
In light of these discrepancies, Yiaga Africa recommended that INEC clarify the inconsistencies in the results, particularly those from Rivers and Imo states. They also suggested extending voting hours to 5:00 PM in future elections and continuing the practice of uploading polling unit results from EC 8A to the INEC Result Viewing portal.
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