The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has challenged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to explain what it described as “statistically implausible” figures in its first-week report on new Permanent Voter Card (PVC) pre-registrations, particularly in the South-West.
In a strongly worded statement issued on Wednesday by its National Publicity Secretary, Malam Bolaji Abdullahi, the ADC expressed deep concern that the data, if not clarified, could erode public trust in the country’s electoral process.
According to INEC’s report, Osun State alone recorded 393,269 pre-registrations in just one week.
The ADC argued that this figure defies logic when compared with historical trends.
“To put this in context,” the party said, “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.”
The ADC noted that even at the peak of political mobilisation during the 2022 governorship election, the state recorded only 823,124 votes cast.
“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 read.
Beyond Osun, the party drew attention to regional disparities.
It observed that the South-West alone accounted for 848,359 pre-registrations, or 67 percent of the national total.
By contrast, the entire South-East recorded only 1,998 pre-registrations in the same period.
The ADC further highlighted that three states; Osun, Lagos, and Ogun accounted for 54.2 percent of all new registrations nationwide, while five states combined; Ebonyi, Imo, Enugu, Abia, and Adamawa barely managed 4,153 registrations, or 0.2 percent of the total.
“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 in the coming elections,” the ADC warned.
Stressing that the voter register is the “foundation of electoral integrity,” the party urged INEC to immediately conduct and publish a forensic audit of the first-week pre-registration data, including a state-by-state breakdown of both physical and online registrations.
The ADC also demanded that INEC release server logs, bandwidth distribution, and regional access reports for the voter registration portal during the week under review.
“Nigerians still remember the bitter consequences of flawed voter rolls and ‘technical glitches’ in past elections. Our democracy cannot withstand another one,” the statement cautioned.
