•INEC Chairman Prof Mahmood Yakubu and ADC spokesman, Bolaji Abdullahi
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of releasing “statistically implausible” figures from the first week of its Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) exercise, specifically questioning how Osun State recorded more new voter registrations in a single week than it did over the previous four years.
In a statement released today, signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the ADC raised an alarm over the figures from the Southwest, which it said account for an extraordinary 67 percent of all pre-registrations nationwide.
According to INEC’s report, Osun State alone recorded 393,269 new pre-registrations in just seven days. The ADC highlighted that this figure far exceeds the 275,815 new voters registered in the state between 2019 and 2023, a period spanning four years.
“To put this in context, Osun has now supposedly registered more people in seven days than it managed to do in an entire electoral cycle of four years,” the statement read.
“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 party further pointed out the glaring disparity between different geopolitical zones. The ADC’s analysis of the data shows that while the Southwest recorded 848,359 pre-registrations, the entire Southeast accounted for only 1,998.
The ADC noted that three states — Osun, Lagos, and Ogun — made up 54.2 percent of all registrations in Nigeria, while five states combined — Ebonyi, Imo, Enugu, Abia, and Adamawa— recorded a paltry 4,153, representing just 0.2 percent of the national total.
The ADC warned that the “fantastic figures” suggest either a “technical ‘glitch’” in INEC’s system or a “more troubling possibility of deliberate manipulation of data.”
The party stressed that the voter register is the bedrock of the electoral process and that any compromise would undermine the integrity of future elections.
To address the concerns, the ADC called on INEC to urgently conduct a full forensic audit of the first-week pre-registration data. It also demanded that the electoral body disclose a state-by-state breakdown of both physical and online registrations, as well as the server logs, bandwidth distribution, and regional access reports for the registration portal.
The ADC urged all opposition political parties to unite in demanding an explanation from INEC and appealed to election monitoring groups, fact-checking organisations, and the international community—including the UN, AU, and ECOWAS—to scrutinize the figures.
“The credibility of our democracy cannot be left to chance,” the statement concluded.
“Silence in the face of these anomalies would amount to complicity. History has shown that when questions about the voter register are left unanswered, the consequences go beyond politics; they touch on national stability itself.”
