The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has demanded a forensic audit of the Permanent Voter Card (PVC) pre-registration in the South-West.
The opposition party also challenged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to explain the “statistically implausible” figures in its first-week report on the PVC registration.
It urged INEC to immediately conduct and publish a forensic audit of the first-week pre-registration data, including a state-by-state breakdown of both physical and online registrations.
The ADC also demanded that INEC release server logs, bandwidth distribution, and regional access reports for the voter registration portal during the week under review.
In a statement issued on Wednesday by its National Publicity Secretary, Malam Bolaji Abdullahi, ADC expressed deep concern that the data, if not clarified, could erode public trust in the country’s electoral process.
INEC said Osun State alone recorded 393,269 pre-registrations in just one week, which prompted ADC’s argument that this figure defies logic when compared with historical trends.
“To put this in context,” ADC said, “Osun added only 275,815 new voters between 2019 and 2023, a period of four years. In other words, Osun has now supposedly registered more people in seven days than it managed to do in an entire electoral cycle.”
The opposition party said even at the peak of political mobilisation during the 2022 governorship election, Osun only recorded 823,124 votes cast. “Now, by some miracle, nearly 20 percent of all eligible adults in the state have rushed to register.
“This is not just unusual, it is statistically implausible,” the statement read.
The party also drew attention to regional disparities beyond Osun state. It said the South West alone accounted for 848,359 pre-registrations (67 percent) of the national total. By contrast, the entire South East recorded only 1,998 pre-registrations in the same period.
The party explained that Osun, Lagos, and Ogun accounted for 54.2 percent of all new registrations nationwide, while five states combined – Ebonyi, Imo, Enugu, Abia, and Adamawa barely managed 4,153 registrations, or 0.2 percent of the total.
“These fantastic figures suggest either another technical glitch in INEC’s digital registration system, or a more troubling possibility of deliberate manipulation of data to lay the ground for a sinister agenda in the coming elections,” the ADC said.
