Severe delays by Nigerian authorities in releasing results from the country’s hotly contested presidential election is feeding suspicion that the process is being mismanaged.
(Bloomberg) — Severe delays by Nigerian authorities in releasing results from the country’s hotly contested presidential election is feeding suspicion that the process is being mismanaged.
Nigeria Latest: Tinubu Wins in Three States; Obi Takes Lagos
The Feb. 25 vote saw the Independent National Electoral Commission use an electronic tallying process nationally for the first time, a change that was designed to boost shaky public trust in the integrity of the West African nation’s democracy. Instead, the lengthy delays in publishing results from the nearly 177,000 polling units online risks sapping confidence that the election will be free and fair.
Fears that the lags could enable the results to be manipulated have been expressed by the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party, whose presidential candidates pose the biggest challenge to Bola Tinubu, the nominee from the ruling All Progressives Congress.
The PDP on Sunday instructed the electoral agency to upload the disaggregated scores “immediately,” alleging that some state governors were trying to compromise the outcome. The Labour Party of candidate Peter Obi voiced similar concerns.
The commission declared results from just four of the 36 states by midday on Monday. Representatives from at least four opposition parties grilled the electoral chairman over the delays at a briefing where the latest tallies were released.
Technical Hitches
INEC assured Nigerians that the slow progress uploading results is “totally due to technical hitches related to scaling up” its platform rather than “any intrusion or sabotage” of its systems. “Results cannot be tampered with,” the agency said in a statement on Sunday.
While images of results from individual polling units were supposed to be transmitted straight after the completion of the count, only a third appeared on the publicly accessible online portal run by INEC as of 2:30 p.m. Monday.
Some of the photographs that were uploaded were of poor quality and difficult to read. The real-time electronic tabulation was introduced to support the manual process the commission uses to declare the winners.
“Challenges with the electronic transfer of results and their upload to a public portal in a timely manner, undermined citizen confidence at a crucial moment in the process,” a joint observation mission of the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute said in a statement on Monday.
“Inadequate communication and a lack of transparency by” INEC “about their cause and extent created confusion and eroded voters’ trust in the process,” the group said.
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