The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has raised concern over what it described as “statistically implausible” pre-registration figures released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in the first week of the ongoing Continuous Voter Registration (CVR).
The party in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, questioned how Osun State alone recorded 393,269 pre-registrations within seven days, exceeding the total number of new voters registered in the state between 2019 and 2023.
“To put this in context, Osun added only 275,815 new voters over a period of four years. Now, by some miracle, the state has supposedly registered more people in one week than it managed to do in an entire electoral cycle,” the statement read.
The ADC noted that the anomalies were more glaring when compared across zones, pointing out that the South West accounted for 67 percent of all pre-registrations nationwide, while the South East recorded just 1,998. Similarly, three states, Osun, Lagos, and Ogun, made up 54.2 percent of the national total, while five states combined barely accounted for 0.2 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 sinister agenda,” the party warned.
The ADC insisted that the voter register is the foundation of Nigeria’s electoral system and any compromise at this stage could undermine public confidence in the 2027 general elections.
The party therefore demanded that INEC conduct and publish a forensic audit of the first-week registration data, with a full state-by-state breakdown of both online and physical registrations, alongside server logs and bandwidth reports.
It further called on opposition parties, election monitoring groups, fact-checking organisations, and the international community to scrutinise the figures and press for accountability.
“The credibility of our democracy cannot be left to chance. Silence in the face of these anomalies would amount to complicity. Nigerians deserve an explanation, and INEC must provide one,” Abdullahi said.