Nigeria election: The mystery of the altered results in disputed poll


President-elect Bola Tinubu is facing legal challenges ahead of his inauguration on 29 May

A BBC investigation has found evidence suggesting some results from Nigeria's presidential election may have been manipulated.

The winner Bola Tinubu is due to be inaugurated on 29 May but the opposition is challenging this.

The BBC has uncovered significant anomalies in Rivers state, a key battleground, although not sufficient to change the overall national outcome of the election, which took place in February.

There are also questions over the identity of an election official who read out some of the unexplained results.

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.

An election official from each LGA then travelled to the state capital, where these results were officially declared.


Example of a tally sheet from a single polling station, one of almost 177,000 across Nigeria

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.

What we found in Rivers state



We found 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 we searched through the election website for every single one of the 6,866 polling stations in Rivers state, we were not able to obtain results from all of them.

Some were incorrectly uploaded, others were missing, even after a month from the date of polling.

For about 5% of polling stations, the photos of tally sheets were too blurred for us to read. It's reasonable to assume that the official count would have included these as they would have had the original documents.

In another 17%, there were no results at all. Many of these would have been places where no voting took place due to security issues or the non-arrival of voting materials. Others had technical problems preventing officials uploading the documents.

So there clearly would have been more polling stations included in the final official results that weren't included in the BBC investigation.

However, these additional tally sheets would have increased the totals for each party, not decreased them. And what we found was that the votes for Peter Obi's Labour Party had decreased sharply in Rivers state.

So how can the sharp fall in votes for Peter Obi - in the official result - be explained?


Peter Obi has contested the outcome of the vote in Rivers state

Where were the biggest discrepancies?

Two areas stood out.

The first was the Oyigbo local government area, where we found:

• The vote for Bola Tinubu was six times larger in the officially announced results compared with the BBC's polling station count

• Peter Obi's votes had been cut in half



The second local government area where we found major discrepancies was in nearby Obio/Akpor:

• The official result for Mr Tinubu was 80,239 votes, but we counted just 17,293 votes from polling station tallies.

• The count for Mr Obi was announced officially as just 3,829 votes, but the BBC counted 74,033 votes for him on the tally sheets.



So how did these differences occur?

As explained earlier, all the polling station sheets are collated at local government (LGA) headquarters.

We found an official election document with these collated votes for the Oyigbo area, signed by an election official and some of the party agents.


The results for Oyigbo (with the two largest parties highlighted)

Several different photographs had been taken of it and uploaded on social media accounts.

The numbers in this document closely matched our own tallies for the two leading candidates (Obi and Tinubu).

This would have been one of the 23 collation sheets from LGAs in Rivers state taken to the state capital, Port Harcourt, for the official declaration.

Broadcast live on television on 27 February, in front of a bank of microphones, Oyigbo election official, Dr Dickson Ariaga, announced his name and that he worked for the Federal College of Education in Omoku.

On the recording, the word "Omoku" is indistinct, but there is only one Federal College of Education in Rivers state.

Dr Ariaga then read out the results for each party in alphabetical order, including for all the smaller parties.


Dr Dickson Ariaga (seated far left) announced the Oyigbo results

They all matched those on the collation sheet the BBC had obtained. But when he reached Mr Tinubu's APC, instead of saying 2,731 as written on our photograph of the sheet, he read out "16,630".

Then for Mr Obi's party (LP) the figure changed again - instead of the 22,289 seen on the sheet, he announced "10,784", more than halving his vote.

The mystery surrounding Dickson Ariaga

We asked the electoral commission if we could speak to Dr Ariaga, but they would not give us his details or reach out to him for us.

We spoke to the election official seated next to Dr Ariaga, but she told us she wasn't authorised to talk to the press.

So we sent a reporter to the Federal College of Education in Omoku, about two hours drive north of Port Harcourt, where he'd said he worked when introducing himself.

The Deputy Provost Moses Ekpa told the BBC: "From our records, both from our payroll and from our human resources, there is no such a name in our system and we don't know such a person."


Moses Ekpa says the Federal College of Education in Omoku has never heard of Dr Ariaga

We tried tracking him down on social media and eventually came across another Facebook account for someone in Port Harcourt, whose profile details had the name Dickson Ariaga.

When we compared an image from this account to the television pictures of Dr Ariaga using Amazon Rekognition software, we achieved a match of 97.2%, indicating a very high probability they're the same man.

Dr Ariaga did not respond to messages sent by us to this account.

By reaching out to his Facebook friends we did finally manage to speak to a man who said he was a relative, who was at first willing to help us but then didn't return our calls.

What have the authorities said?

We put these findings to Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (Inec).

Johnson Sinikiem, Inec's regional spokesman in Port Harcourt, told us that due to a "gross shortage of time and personnel" they had needed to take on some people without verifying their identity documents.

Referring to Dr Ariaga, he said: "If he had presented himself as a lecturer from [the college in Omoku] and it's otherwise, then he is dishonest."

We also approached Inec's headquarters in Abuja for a response to our findings of discrepancies in the results in Rivers state. We were told that they were unable to comment due to ongoing legal challenges.

This is just one case in one state in southern Nigeria where the evidence points to the results having been manipulated.

On their own, these altered results would not have decisively swayed the outcome of the presidential election. Bola Tinubu won the national presidential vote by 1.8m votes over his nearest rival, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP.


We're still looking for Dr Ariaga to respond to the findings in this report.

Additional reporting by Liana Bravo, Jemimah Herd, Jake Horton and Kumar Malhotra

Edited by Dan Isaacs

Ireportlive:


17% of the results where not uploaded
5% uploaded were blurry

If you generously dash Peter Obi all of Tinubu's Rivers vote 200k Tinubu still leads Atiku with over 1.6m votes

Dash Peter Obi all of Tinubu's 572k Lagos vote plus 200k Rivers vote and let's assume Tinubu had zero votes in Rivers and Lagos.. Tinubu still leads with over 1m votes

North plays a major role in who governs Nigeria


.

Ireportlive:


17% of the results where not uploaded
5% uploaded were blurry

If you generously dash Peter Obi all of Tinubu's Rivers vote 200k Tinubu still leads Atiku with over 1.6m votes

Dash Peter Obi all of Tinubu's 572k Lagos vote plus 200k Rivers vote and let's assume Tinubu had zero votes in Rivers and Lagos.. Tinubu still leads with over 1m votes

North plays a major role in who governs Nigeria


.

Ireportlive:


17% of the results where not uploaded
5% uploaded were blurry

If you generously dash Peter Obi all of Tinubu's Rivers vote 200k Tinubu still leads Atiku with over 1.6m votes

Dash Peter Obi all of Tinubu's 572k Lagos vote plus 200k Rivers vote and let's assume Tinubu had zero votes in Rivers and Lagos.. Tinubu still leads with over 1m votes

North plays a major role in who governs Nigeria


.

seunmsg:
3 months after the election, it is only Rivers state result that is inconsistent with what was declared. Enough has been said about Rivers state already. Why not give us evidence of result manipulation in other states if there are any? Why only Rivers state?

Rivers state result will be invalidated or recalculated and it still won’t change anything. Tinubu will still be first, Atiku second and Obi third. So, why all the noise? Whatever Wike did in Rivers ended in Rivers. It is not enough to substantially affect the overall outcome of the presidential election.

franchasofficia:
It's not just in Rivers state, Peter Obi's actual votes were massively suppressed in Lagos. The margin was so wide that Tinubu, Sanwo-olu, MC Oluomo and the rest of Lagos APC stakeholders got made and went on rampage to prepare for the Governorship election.



Sanwo-olu after seeing the actual huge margin Obi used to win Lagos became humble overnight that he started doing all sorts of things to convince Lagosians that he was different from Tinubu while MC Oluomo charged his agberos to take the laws by their hands and do whatever it takes to win Lagos for Sanwo-olu to avoid extinction of their decadelong Agberoism extortion in Lagos.




Based on our inhouse collation, Peter Obi won the below states with very wide margin that will push his total votes to over 9million votes:


Lagos
Rivers
Plateau
Bayelsa
Akwa Ibom
Cross River
Benue



Obi got over and around 25% in:


Adamawa yes Adamawa
Borno
Kaduna
Sokoto
Bauchi
Taraba
Nasarawa
Ekiti
Ogun
Ondo
Kogi


Obi won the below states with no or insignificant vote suppression:


Anambra
Abia
Ebonyi
Imo
Enugu
Delta
Edo
Abuja

Saga16:
Chiagozie Nwonwu.

seunmsg:
3 months after the election, it is only Rivers state result that is inconsistent with what was declared. Enough has been said about Rivers state already. Why not give us evidence of result manipulation in other states if there are any? Why only Rivers state?

Rivers state result will be invalidated or recalculated and it still won’t change anything. Tinubu will still be first, Atiku second and Obi third. So, why all the noise? Whatever Wike did in Rivers ended in Rivers. It is not enough to substantially affect the overall outcome of the presidential election.

seunmsg:
3 months after the election, it is only Rivers state result that is inconsistent with what was declared. Enough has been said about Rivers state already. Why not give us evidence of result manipulation in other states if there are any? Why only Rivers state?

Rivers state result will be invalidated or recalculated and it still won’t change anything. Tinubu will still be first, Atiku second and Obi third. So, why all the noise? Whatever Wike did in Rivers ended in Rivers. It is not enough to substantially affect the overall outcome of the presidential election.

Ofunaofu:


No one is dashing any one any vote rather when the valid votes are counted and deducted from what ever Tinubu is alleged to have garnered, it will surprise you that Tinubu didn't meet any requirement needed to be declared winner

DMerciful:
If you return Obi's votes from Tinubu's vote thats were fraudulently awarded to Tinubu, he will not meet the popular votes and 2/3 of 24 states!

Ireportlive:


That is the funny thing about law... Valid votes are votes with fingerprint intact and voters accreditation done by BVAS

What Wike did in Rivers is Voter inducement through heavy bribing using dollars in some instances and alleged voter suppression by his 200,000 special adviser

My point here is Rivers State vote remains valid under the law and Tinubu is not in anyway going to suffer any loss of vote

And as for requirements only Tinubu has National spread of 2/3 in 20 State

Should the election be cancelled Obi can't still get more than 12 state voter spread

Ireportlive:


17% of the results where not uploaded
5% uploaded were blurry

If you generously dash Peter Obi all of Tinubu's Rivers vote 200k Tinubu still leads Atiku with over 1.6m votes

Dash Peter Obi all of Tinubu's 572k Lagos vote plus 200k Rivers vote and let's assume Tinubu had zero votes in Rivers and Lagos.. Tinubu still leads with over 1m votes

North plays a major role in who governs Nigeria


.

Ofunaofu:


So, it has finally fallen from 29 states to 20 state
Bro, the matter is already in court, wait to see it is fall further to below 10, there you will realise that Tinubu and APC didn't meet any of the requirements needed to be declared winner

Ireportlive:


Court are not magicians

Obi can't and won't win in Oyo State where I voted, I know for a fact he can't win North

Megabig:
This kind manipulation eh, y’all should stop calling yakubu, hold these ones used as tools accountable, the Yakubu that God will punish have a lot of baggage’s and orders he gave too such as telling them not to upload result in real time(if proven) and others. But you see those inec commissioners in each state? We have to start holding them accountable too…