₦airaland Forum

INDEPENDENT NATIONAL ELECTORAL COMMISSION

PRESS RELEASE

PUBLICATION OF FINAL LIST AND PERSONAL PARTICULARS OF CANDIDATES FOR BYE-ELECTIONS

Nigerians may recall that recently the Commission released the Timetable and Schedule of Activities for bye-elections arising from the death or resignation of Members of the National and State Houses of Assembly.

These elections will be held on Saturday 3rd February 2024 across nine States of the Federation covering two Senatorial Districts (Ebonyi South and Yobe East); four Federal Constituencies (Shanga/Ngaski/Yauri Federal Constituency of Kebbi State, Surulere I Federal Constituency of Lagos State, Akoko North East/Akoko North West Federal Constituency of Ondo State and Jalingo/Yorro/Zing Federal Constituency of Taraba State); and three State Constituencies (Guma I State Constituency of Benue State, Chibok State Constituency of Borno State and Chikun State Constituency of Kaduna State).

As provided in the Timetable and Schedule of Activities, the personal particulars and final list of candidates have been published today in our State offices and the affected constituencies pursuant to the provision of Section 29(3) of the Electoral Act, 2022. The list of candidates is also published on our website and social media platforms.

We appeal to Nigerians to scrutinize the personal particulars (Form EC9 and academic credentials) of the candidates. Any aspirant who participated in his/her party primaries with reasonable grounds to believe that the information provided by the candidate is false can challenge the nomination in a Federal high Court as provided in Section 29(5) of the Electoral Act 2022.

For clarity, this publication ONLY applies to the forthcoming bye-elections as they are fresh elections for which political parties conducted primaries and nominated their candidates.


..
For the re-run elections to be held on the same day, the list and personal particulars of candidates [b]have been published before the 2023 General Election. The re-run elections are conducted pursuant to the orders of the Election Petition Appeal Tribunals. They are not fresh elections open to new/disqualified candidates which obviates the need to publish their personal particulars again.

Sam Olumekun mni
National Commissioner and Chairman,
Information and Voter Education Committee
Wednesday 17th January 2024

BluntCrazeMan:
THIS IS HOW THE VARIOUS POLITICAL PARTIES CAN PREPARE VERY WELL FOR THE UPCOMING ELECTIONS IN ORDER TO AVOID BEING CHEATED OR RIGGED-OUT BY THE INEC.


Let me just try and suggest to the political parties what they should be doing in all these upcoming elections; pending the time we have functional implementable and enforceable Electoral-Laws in Nigeria.


1. Elections must Not start in any polling-unit where the sensitive materials are not complete, or tampered with, or not well documented by the polling-officers and party-agents.

The nonsense that happened in Kogi State, where elections started in some Polling-units without the presence of the Result-Sheets.
The results were later written on PLAIN SHEETS OF PAPERS, and then, an entirely different result (written on the Supposed Actual EC8A Results Sheets) were later uploaded to the IREV-Portal.
...(That was so baadd).



2. If the INEC Officials said that the essential sensitive-materials would be brought to the Polling-units later, then the election MUST NOT START, until the sensitive-materials arrive.

Everybody at the polling-unit must wait for the sensitive materials to arrive in full, and properly documented before the election can start off..




3. The materials and booklets that were sighted before the election must be properly documented by the party agents too.

(These materials and booklets that were recorded before the election must be collated independently by the political parties -- WHILE THE MAIN VOTING CONTINUED)



4. These untampered sensitive-materials and booklets (including their serial-numbers too) which were documented and collated before the elections started, would later serve as a serious tool for Checks-and-balances after the whole Collation must have been completed.
[Section-73(2)-Electoral-Act-2022]



5. After the whole election had been completed and concluded at each of the polling-units, all the remaining materials and booklets must be counted and properly documented, and their serial-numbers noted too..
(These remaining materials and booklets must also be collated independently again by the political party - for all the polling-units).



6. By applying the methods of checks-and-balances;
Whenever a results-sheet with a wrong Serial-Number is presented by any official at any collation-center, it would be noticed immediately and rejected outrightly.

(It means that the original sheet which was generated at the polling-unit had been swapped with another sheet which has another serial-number)




7. Still on the methods of Checks-and-balances;
The difference between the collated untampered full-booklets of ballot papes and that of those remaining booklets of ballot papers, would equal the number of used ballot papers, which is supposed to be equal to the “total votes cast + the destroyed ballots”.




8. The INEC - if left on their own - would not perform all these checks because they are in a haste to do what they want to do and end the whole process as quickly as possible.

But since the party-agents are also there as the electoral watchdogs, they must fully and aggressively apply these checks-and-balances, and use them to seriously question the credibility and the transparency of the elections.



9. On a very normal election day when massive rigging occurred, the values of the total number of ballot-papers used which INEC would be announcing would be so high.
(And these would be far higher than the actual number used as calculated from the checks-and-balances)..



10. The political parties must have their own fully independently collated parallel results of the election itself -- which is supposed to be totally independent of the INEC’s official collation.

The political parties Should Not solely depend on the collated results of the INEC for any reason.
It's too dangerous...



11. If there were transparent elections, the INEC’s-collated results should be in agreement with those parallel results that were independently collated by the political parties.

Then, under prefect conditions, all the results are supposed to all be exactly the same -- even though they were all done independently.



12. For the official collation of results by the INEC, the party-agents must make sure that they are fully present while the collation exercise progresses, no matter what happens there.

The party-agents Must Not boycott any part of the official collation exercise, be it at the lower level or at higher level.



13. For any collation-center where the party-agents were forcefully prevented from entering inside,, such party-agents must endeavour to capture such moments on videos as concrete evidence against the INEC and against such persons who prevented them from entering, so that it would be documented that the collation which happened inside such a center was fraudulent.



14. For any Ward-Level collation center where the “Accreditation Data” & “The Polling-Units Results” were not first cross-checked and re-confirmed using the BVAS-Machines; then, the collation officer at that collation center must be recorded on video and kept as evidence for violating the election procedures as clearly stated inside the Electoral-Act-2022.



These are my suggestions for now..
The political parties -- through their party-agents should be doing the tedious and rigorous works of the checks-and-balances for now,, until the time the electoral-act fully allows the new technological innovations to be doing the required checks-and-balances.

it's really very tedious, but they do not have much options for now.

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2023:
PRELIMINARY STUDIES SUGGEST THAT OVER-VOTING OCCURRED IN MORE THAN 9,700 POLLING-UNITS..

..
..

Preamble:
The 2023 Presidential Election had come and gone and forgotten.
That's okay. We are moving on.

But the ripple effects of the presidential election are still affecting the future elections that are coming after it.
For instance, the off-cycle elections in Imo State and Kogi State were good examples.

The type of electoral fraud which took place in Kogi and Imo State made me to look back to the figures-and-data that were presented in the public during the Presidential Election, and it spurred me to do some totally different fresh analyses all over again.


Introduction to the topic of the analysis:
Of all the Five Petitioners at the tribunal, none of them ever paid any attention to the aspect of over-voting..
None of the petitioners tried to determine the extent of over-voting which occured during the presidential election, and how many registered voters it affected.

And we the voters also didn't bother to look in that direction too...

Well, not until the gross malpractice in Imo State and Kogi State happened in November 2023,, then I started seeking all-over again for the Presidential Election Figures, which more-or-less had already been forgotten.

The Methods Of Analysis Used.
I remembered that a particular data-analyst by the name Mark-Essien tried to digitize the values of the votes scored by the Four Major Contending parties, by using the photos of the Results-sheets which uploaded to the IREV-Portal by the INEC, and to use the digitized values of the votes to re-collate the election results all over again..
https://www.nairaland.com/7628069/mark-essiens-irev-collation-used

In this study of mine, I used those digitized data which he presented in the dataset which he released to do the analyses.

I also remembered that in the process of the digitization by Mark-Essien, he also published the number of Accredited Voters for each polling-unit which were transmitted by the BVAS-machines from the polling-units to a certain Accreditation Server that was owned and operated by the INEC -- (the details in this particular accreditation server were still publicly available as at the time when Mark-Essien published his digitized election data).

However, I have to categorically state it here, that this particular Accreditation Server which originally contained the publicly available accreditation data, was turned off by the INEC when the date for the commencement of the hearing/trial at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal approached (for reasons best known to them). And as a result, the accreditation data was no longer publicly available on the INEC’s website.

Nevertheless, the accreditation data as was reproduced and published by Mark-Essien is still publicly available online, and that was the bedrock for this whole analysis.

In order to determine the over-voting in the various polling-units, since the number of the total votes cast were not available in the whole dataset,, I used the sum of the votes of the four major contending parties as the number of the total votes cast (even though it was lower than the actual number of the total votes cast, it would still lead me to making some findings).


Results and Outputs:
In the end, I came to realise that 9,780 polling-units had their “sum-of-votes-of-four-major-parties” higher than the Transmitted number of Accredited Voters, and this affected a total number of 5,382,847 registered voters.

This means that, if we used the value of the “Total Number of Votes Cast” to compare, then the values as presented would be definitely higher; and also, if INEC uploaded all the correct photos of all the polling-units results to the IREV-Portal, we would still be having even a higher value.

(Recall that the Margin of Lead as announced by the INEC was 1,810,206 votes..
Whereas the number of voters which was supposedly affected by Over-voting -- as I calculated in the analysis -- was 5,382,847)..


Conclusions:
This means that;
If ANY of the Petitioners (especially the PDP), had paid any slightest attention to the over-voting aspect of the electoral malpractice in their petition, and they produced the whole lists of the all the affected polling-units and the number of registered voters that were affected,, the outcome of the PEPT would have been different..

And again, the crazy malpractices which happened in Imo State and Kogi State in November 2023 wouldn't have happened so brazenly.

...
***Caveat:
These analyses was carried out by me alone, based on the data provided by the original work done by Mark-Essien. My team didn't help me on this one. And it took me just two days of working and analysing the whole sets of data.


Here below is the link to the output of the analysis which I did,, as well as some comments..

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JqzQsbTUx9ADzMT5MsX1pHODmGgaaDU2.

ezegenigbonine:
Abeg make una announce the assumed winners as usual instead of wasting peoples time, money and energy. Anybody wey no like am can go to court

wizelink:
Hmm inec again. What's the need of wasting the scarce money when the result will be rigged in the end. Abeg select people for that position and rechannel that money meant for the selection into the economy.

ThinkSmarter:
In Ebonyi South Senatorial District, Linus Okorie of LP should win Austine Umahi of APC if the election is free and fair.

outoftheworld:
No body takes them seriously

Promax4321:
The man that did over-voting analysis must have taken shekpe or other, as the 23 election had the lowest turnup number of vote cast and removing 5 million from result will interpret less than Lagos and Kano normal votes.

The result by percentage interpreted to hat LP win area is most affected and every state has over voting. That every party rigged election results, which means universal cheating by parties.

This also interprete that Prof Yakubu did a wonderful job and he should be reward with the best officials in Nigerian election.

This also interpreted that the election result as mentioned by inec was very correct and credible, only Nigerian are not credible and truthful.

PortHarcourtcit:
I pray that the LP will accept the results when they lose and congratulate the winners.... Princeofsarcasm what's your day?...

Addme:
I am much more concerned about PDP faith in Plateau North Senatorial Zone and Jos North/Bassa Federal Constituency.

ThinkSmarter:
In Ebonyi South Senatorial District, Linus Okorie of LP should win Austine Umahi of APC if the election is free and fair.

BluntCrazeMan:
..

garfield1:
Where is akamkpa/ biase,ini/ikono,Jos north/ bassa and plateau north