..Party queries Osun’s 393,000 new voters in one week

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has raised serious concerns over the first-week report released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on the ongoing Continuous Voter Registration exercise, describing the figures as “statistically implausible” and potentially damaging to the credibility of future elections.

In a statement signed on Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party questioned how Osun State alone could have recorded 393,269 new pre-registrations within just seven days. By comparison, the party noted, Osun added only 275,815 new voters across a four-year period between 2019 and 2023.

“In Osun, one week’s registration has exceeded the total number of new voters in an entire electoral cycle. This is not just unusual, it is statistically implausible,” the ADC said.

The party also expressed alarm at the regional breakdown of the data. According to INEC’s figures, the South West zone accounted for 67 percent of all registrations nationwide—848,359 in total—while the entire South East recorded fewer than 2,000 new registrations. Three states—Osun, Lagos, and Ogun—together made up more than half (54.2 percent) of the national figure, compared with just 0.2 percent combined for Ebonyi, Imo, Enugu, Abia, and Adamawa states.

ADC suggested that the discrepancies could be the result of either another “technical glitch” in INEC’s digital system or a deliberate manipulation of data. Either way, the party warned, the credibility of Nigeria’s electoral process is at stake.

“The voter register is the foundation of the entire electoral process. If the foundation is compromised, it brings the integrity of the elections into question,” the statement read.

The ADC called on INEC to conduct and publish a forensic audit of the first-week registration data, including a detailed breakdown of online and physical registrations, server logs, bandwidth allocation, and regional access to the portal.

The party also urged other opposition parties, civil society groups, and fact-checking organisations to join in demanding accountability from the electoral body.

Furthermore, the ADC appealed to international partners including the United Nations, the African Union, and ECOWAS to pay early attention to the development, warning that the credibility of the 2027 general elections could be jeopardised if anomalies in the voter register are not addressed.

“Silence in the face of these anomalies would amount to complicity,” Abdullahi said, stressing that Nigeria’s democratic stability depends on transparency in the voter registration process.