…urges UN, AU, ECOWAS to take early interest in ongoing CVR
African Democratic Congress, on Thursday, demanded a forensic audit of the Independent National Electoral Commission’s first-week voter registration figures.
ADC, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, on Thursday, expressed concern over what it termed “statistically implausible” figures released by INEC.
The opposition coalition party therefore warned that leaving such discrepancies unaddressed could erode public confidence in Nigeria’s electoral process.
On August 18, INEC officially began the nationwide Continuous Voter Registration exercise.
The electoral body stated that the online registration will run from Monday, August 18, 2025, to Wednesday, December 10, 2025, while physical/on-site registration at designated centres will commence on Monday, August 25, 2025.
ADC in its reaction to the first week of the exercise, questioned the registration process in the South West, stressing that the figures from Osun State in particular contradict both historical trends and demographic realities.
According to the statement, “The African Democratic Congress has viewed the first set of data released by the Independent National Electoral Commission on new Continuous Voter registrations with great concern.
“According to INEC’s figures, Osun State alone recorded 393,269 pre-registrations in just one week. To put this in context, 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 of four years.
“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 per cent of all eligible adults in the state have rushed to register. This is not just unusual, it is statistically implausible.
“The anomalies become even more glaring when viewed in the context of the overall registration report. Across the six geopolitical zones, the South West alone accounts for 848,359 pre-registrations, an astonishing 67 per cent of the national total. By contrast, the entire South East recorded just 1,998 pre-registrations.
“To further illustrate, three states Osun, Lagos, and Ogun make up 54.2 per cent of all pre-registrations in Nigeria, while five states combined Ebonyi, Imo, Enugu, Abia, and Adamawa barely recorded 4,153, or 0.2 per cent, while the entire North East recorded just 6.1 per cent.”
Abdullahi claimed that the figures point either to another technical fault in INEC’s digital registration system or, more concerning, to a deliberate manipulation of data aimed at preparing the ground for a sinister agenda in the forthcoming elections.
The ADC stated, “In either case, INEC has some explanations to give. We must be clear: the voter register is the foundation upon which the entire electoral process rests. If the foundation is compromised, it brings the integrity of the elections into question. Nigerians still remember the bitter consequences of flawed voter rolls and technical glitches in past elections. Our democracy cannot withstand another one.
“The ADC therefore calls on INEC to urgently conduct and publish a full forensic audit of the first-week pre-registration data, with a state-by-state breakdown of both physical and online registrations. INEC should also disclose the server logs, bandwidth distribution, and regional access reports for the registration portal during this period.
“We call on all opposition political parties to set aside rivalry and jointly demand clarity from INEC on these glaring anomalies. We urge election monitoring groups, fact-checking organisations, and legal advocacy bodies to independently interrogate these numbers and press for accountability.
“We also invite our partners in the international community—the United Nations, the African Union, ECOWAS, and Nigeria’s democratic allies—to take early interest in these developments, as the credibility of the 2027 elections begins with the integrity of this voter register.”
