Evidence that some presidential election results in Nigeria may have been falsified has been discovered by the BBC.
The opposition is contesting Bola Tinubu’s inauguration, which is scheduled for May 29.
The BBC has found major irregularities in Rivers state, a crucial electoral battleground, but not enough to alter the election’s final results nationally, which were announced in February.
The name of the election officer who read out some of the puzzling results is now under scrutiny.
How votes are counted in Nigeria
On 25 February, Nigerians cast their votes at thousands of polling stations across the country. At each polling station, the votes for the party of each candidate were publicly announced and the results sheets taken for collation first at the ward level, then at local government (LGA) centres.
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An election official from each LGA then travelled to the state capital, where these results were officially declared.
For the first time in a Nigerian election, photographs of the polling station results sheets were published online by the electoral commission. This made it possible to add up all the polling station sheets and to compare them with the results declared at the state level.
Rivers state
The BBC report revealed that the voting tally sheets from over 6,000 polling stations in Rivers state, where many of the opposition complaints had been made.
While the official result in this state gave a clear majority to Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), our tally suggested that Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) had actually received most votes in the state by a wide margin.
It further alleged that an increase of just over 106,000 in Mr Tinubu’s vote in the official declaration when compared with our polling station tally – almost doubling his total in the state. In contrast, Mr Obi’s vote had fallen by over 50,000.
It’s important to make clear that although the BBC searched through the election website for every single one of the 6,866 polling stations in Rivers state, it was not able to obtain results from all of them.
Even a month after the polling date, some were posted improperly and others were absent. The images of the tally sheets for around 5% of the polling places were too blurry for us to read. Since they would have had the original documents, it becomes sense to infer that the official count would have included these.
17% of the time, there were absolutely no results. Many of them would have been locations where voting was not conducted because of security concerns or a lack of voting materials. Others were unable to submit the documents because of technical issues.
Therefore, it is obvious that more polling places that were excluded from the BBC inquiry would have been included in the official final results.
However, instead of decreasing the totals for each party, these extra tally sheets would have raised them.
And the BBC discovered that Rivers state has seen a significant decline in votes for Peter Obi’s Labour Party.
