Findings by Civic Hive, a non-governmental organisation championing civic engagement through technology, have shown that there were irregularities in the data for registered voters and accredited votes in the 2024 Ondo State governorship election.
According to a report released on Tuesday by Civic Hive, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had announced that there were 1,981,459 registered voters and 510,855 accredited votes but INEC’s Result Viewing (IReV) portal recorded completely different figures.
The IReV portal recorded 1,853,369 registered voters and 518,802 accredited votes for the same election.
This indicates an increase of 128,090 in the number of registered voters announced by INEC compared to the figures on the IReV portal. Also, the total accredited votes on the result portal showed a difference of 7,947 voters compared to the numbers announced by INEC.
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A total of 18 political parties participated in the 2024 election. The four major candidates were Lucky Aiyedatiwa of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Agboola Ajayi of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Olorunfemi Ayodele of the Labour Party (LP) and Abbas Mimiko of the Zenith Labour Party (ZLP).
At the end of the election, INEC declared Aiyedatiwa the winner.
The Ondo State 2024 governorship election as announced by INEC. Source: Civic Hive
The civic tech organisation observed that, based on its analysis of several elections, INEC’s conduct and result collation framework allows for result manipulation, weird anomalies and intentional sabotage of the result collation process by electoral officers.
“Results, as announced by INEC. should reinforce the people’s faith in the institution and not cause further division and voter apathy in the country. As any unnecessary, unexplained delay or perpetual recurrence of disparities in voters results as the ballot boxes and the result moves from PUs to different collation centres will feed suspicions concerning the integrity of results processing,” it stated.
Regarding the Ondo election, the organisation said it was marred by vote buying, voter suppression and low voter turnout. There were also irregularities in the result from INEC, what the civic tech observers collated at the ward and what it collated on the IREV portal.
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Beyond the inconsistency in the number of registered voters and accredited votes announced by INEC and the ones shown on the result viewing portal, Civic Hive found that the votes accrued by the three major parties announced by the commission differed from what was available on the portal.
INEC said APC had 366,781 votes, PDP had 117,845 votes while LP had 1,162 votes, but the data on IReV showed that these three parties had 364,969, 113,726 and 13,490 votes respectively.
This means that APC’s votes rose by 1,812, PDP votes increased by 4,119 and LP’s votes were reduced by 12,328.
The civic tech NGO stated that this shows the ineffectiveness of INEC’s result collation. Among other recommendations, it called for an immediate audit by INEC on the result collation framework and alternative models aimed at enhancing transparency, accuracy and security in election collation.
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