The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has reaffirmed its exclusive statutory authority to collate and declare election results in Nigeria, following a proposal by Peter Obi to establish an independent system for tracking and collating results during the 2027 general elections.
Obi, the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), said his campaign organisation plans to deploy a system that would receive results directly from polling units alongside INEC’s official transmission platform.
The proposal has received support from the African Democratic Congress (ADC), which has also announced plans to develop its own capacity to independently collate results during the election.
The moves reflect growing efforts by opposition political groups to maintain independent records of polling-unit results amid concerns over the transparency and management of Nigeria’s electoral process.
Speaking during an interview with Arise TV on Thursday, Obi said his team would establish a system capable of receiving and monitoring results as they are recorded at polling units.
He said the arrangement would involve a “dual transmission” process, under which results would be transmitted through the official INEC channel while copies would simultaneously be sent to his campaign’s situation room.
“We must make sure that at every polling unit, the votes are counted, the votes are recorded properly, the votes are transmitted properly,” Obi said.
Obi said the objective was not to create an alternative electoral authority but to provide an additional mechanism for verifying results generated at polling units.
His proposal comes against the background of continuing disputes over the 2023 presidential election and concerns raised by opposition parties about INEC’s handling of electronic result transmission.
INEC declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu the winner of the 2023 presidential election, while Obi and former vice president Atiku Abubakar challenged the outcome in court. The courts upheld Tinubu’s victory.
Obi and his supporters have, however, continued to maintain that he won the election and that the official result did not reflect the votes cast at polling units.
The commission’s latest position means that any independent results platform established by political parties or candidates would have no authority to replace INEC’s official collation process.
The ADC has similarly indicated that it intends to establish an independent results-monitoring structure ahead of the 2027 election.
The party’s National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, said the party would not rely exclusively on INEC’s collation of results.
“Absolutely. We are also saying that we will not trust the collation of results to INEC. We are also building the capacity to collate our results,” Abdullahi said.
Technology experts who examined the proposal said there was nothing technically unusual about a political party establishing a platform to collect, transmit and analyse polling-unit results.
Senior systems analyst Esther Folorunso said accredited party agents could use secure mobile applications to photograph completed result sheets and transmit them to a central database.
Such a system could capture information including the polling-unit number, location and time of submission, while preserving photographs of the original documents.
Folorunso, however, said the major challenge would be implementing such a system nationwide.
She identified poor internet connectivity, cybersecurity threats, human error, duplicate submissions, data manipulation and the need to train and equip a large network of polling agents as potential problems.
She stressed that an independent platform would not replace INEC’s official result-management system but could provide an additional verification and audit mechanism.
Data scientist and visualisation expert Aniekpong D. Effiong also described Obi’s proposal as technically feasible but noted that political parties already have access to polling-unit results through their agents.
Polling agents are entitled to obtain copies of signed polling-unit result sheets, including Form EC8A, and can transmit photographs of the documents to their respective parties.
Civil society organisations have also conducted parallel vote tabulation exercises using results obtained from selected polling units to independently assess official election figures.
According to Effiong, the main difference with Obi’s proposal would be the scale at which the process could be deployed.
He noted that Nigeria’s 176,846 polling units would make nationwide coverage a major logistical undertaking.
Effiong also warned that a party-controlled results platform could create confusion if its figures were presented as an alternative to the official results announced by INEC.
He said fabricated figures, fake screenshots and unverified claims could spread rapidly on social media during the period between the end of voting and the conclusion of official collation.
Information systems and risk analyst Olufemi Esan said the usefulness of an independent results platform would depend largely on its ability to establish a reliable chain of evidence from individual polling units to a central database.
He said party agents should not simply enter figures into an application but should capture images of completed result sheets, verify the polling-unit details and transmit the evidence through an authenticated system.
According to Esan, the original image of each result sheet, the numerical data extracted from it and information identifying the person who submitted it should be preserved separately.
“This creates something much more useful than a spreadsheet. It creates an audit trail,” Esan said.
He explained that such an audit trail could enable political parties to compare the results recorded at polling units with figures that emerge at subsequent stages of the official collation process.
Esan also said any national results-monitoring system would have to account for areas with unreliable telecommunications networks.
He recommended that the system should be capable of securely storing result information offline and transmitting it once connectivity becomes available.
He further suggested the use of data analytics to identify anomalies such as duplicate submissions, missing polling units, unexplained gaps and results that exceed the number of accredited voters.
Such alerts, he said, would not by themselves prove electoral fraud but could identify results that require further investigation.
The proposal has also been linked to earlier calls by Big Tent Coalition convener, Professor Pat Utomi, for multiple channels of election-result verification.
Utomi had advocated a system in which polling-unit results could be photographed and transmitted through different independent networks immediately after they were signed.
He explained that the objective was to create redundancy in the results-management process rather than allow any single organisation to control the verification of election figures.
According to him, church groups, diaspora networks and civil society organisations could participate by independently documenting and transmitting polling-unit result sheets.
Legal practitioners, however, have questioned the legal basis for any attempt by political parties to conduct independent election collation.
Senior Advocate of Nigeria Abdul Balogun said candidates and political parties were free to monitor results through their own structures but could not establish a parallel collation process whose figures would have legal effect.
“Each party or candidate is free to have the results of the elections monitored the way it feels, but such collation cannot be binding on INEC,” he said.
Professor of Law Ajida S. Bello described the proposal as potentially useful because it could enable candidates to independently monitor their performance at polling units.
He said independent monitoring could also put pressure on electoral officials to maintain accurate records and could contribute to transparency if properly implemented.
Bello, however, warned that politicians could also manipulate independent systems and use competing figures to undermine the electoral process.
Barrister Imeh Ukpong similarly expressed concern that allowing competing collation structures could create confusion and disrupt the official process.
The emerging debate therefore centres on the distinction between independently documenting election results and assuming the legal authority to declare them.
Political parties and candidates can collect copies of polling-unit results, preserve them, analyse them and use them to challenge discrepancies through the appropriate legal channels.
They cannot, however, assume INEC’s statutory responsibility to conduct the official collation or declare the winner of an election.
With the 2027 general elections approaching, the push for independent results tracking is expected to remain a major issue in discussions about electoral transparency, particularly among opposition parties seeking greater control over the verification of results from polling units.
For such systems to contribute meaningfully to electoral credibility, analysts say they would need strong authentication, transparent procedures, secure data storage, reliable audit trails and safeguards against the spread of unverified figures.
Ultimately, any independent results platform would serve as a monitoring and verification tool, while the legally recognised authority to conduct the official collation and declare the election outcome remains with INEC.
