According to voters’ registration documents analysed by The Guardian, “the number of new voters registered in Nigeria since January 2018 has increased by almost exactly the same percentage in each of its states."
Data provided in Nigeria’s voter registration documents have raised fears of possible mass rigging in the elections, an analysis by The Guardian UK suggests.
In less than 24 hours, Nigerians would vote for a new president from a pool of more than 70 candidates.
However, a report by the UK-based newspaper noted that the increase in the number of voters across the 36 states of Nigeria is “statistically impossible”.
According to voters’ registration documents analysed by The Guardian, “the number of new voters registered in Nigeria since January 2018 has increased by almost exactly the same percentage in each of its states."
The report read in part: “On average, voter registration in each state increased by 2.2% between April 2017 and January 2018, and by 7.7% for the whole registration period ahead of Saturday’s election.
“Plotted on a scatter line graph, there is a 0.99 correlation across all the states, without a single outlier. According to three separate data analysts, the parity cannot be a coincidence.
“Only God works that closely,” one analyst said. If some of the new voters registered are fake, it would imply meddling at the electoral commission, though it is unclear whether it would be the ruling party or the opposition that would stand to benefit.
“A clue may have been dropped last July when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), perhaps inadvertently, publicly referenced a different set of results to the one on which Buhari’s victory was based.
“Both documents showed 29.4 million votes were cast. But according to the original results, 31.7 million accredited voters participated in the election, whereas in the second set of results that figure dropped to 23.6 million.
“The discrepancy suggests an additional 6 million accredited voters, far more than the APC’s winning margin — as per the original result set — of 2.6 million votes.”