New research conducted by Dr. Obioma C. Nwankwo has revealed that Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Gregory Obi was the likely winner of the Nigerian presidential election held on February 25, 2023, in locations where thugs and hooligans had no access or free reign. Nwankwo's research was titled "Assessing the Likely Winner of the 2023 Nigeria Presidential Election Using the Voting Patterns at Military Installations and Environs."
Nwankwo selected only the results from military formations across Nigeria's 36 states for his analysis because he believed that those locations were the ones where nobody could attempt ballot snatching or result sheet mutilation in the polling units. According to his results, Obi won the presidential election even in places like Bauchi.
The election in Nigeria had been judged by local and international observers as faulty and deplorable, with manipulation of results, underage voting, voter intimidation, and voter suppression. The independent national electoral commission (INEC) introduced the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS) and electronic transmission of results from polling units to minimize rigging, but the failure to electronically transmit the results from polling units during the recent presidential election as promised by INEC led to widespread belief of result-tampering, making it difficult to know the true number of votes scored by the candidates.
Nwankwo deployed the voting patterns at locations where the integrity of the voting results can be guaranteed as a surrogate to estimate the true votes scored by the candidates. He used military installations and their immediate surroundings for his study, arguing that they were arguably the best locations where the integrity of the election results could be trusted. "The military is also populated by the different ethnic groups that constitute the federation and should, therefore, to an extent, reflect the opinions of different ethnicities," Nwankwo said. "Additionally, the political views of the communities that host these installations should also be captured because these polling units are not exclusive to the military."
Nwankwo used the official INEC result-reporting website for his study, documenting the local government, ward, polling unit code, name of polling unit, and the number of votes scored by LP, APC, and PDP for the polling units that meet the inclusion criteria. The number of votes scored by the NNPP was also recorded for Kano state. Out of the total of 176,846 polling units, some 167,443 results had been uploaded as of the time of this publication.
Nwankwo's results showed that Obi (LP) scored 1,694.83 per cent of votes across the 36 states and the FCT, Bola Ahmed Tinubu (APC) got 787.99 per cent, while Atiku Abubakar (PDP) went home with 574.12 per cent votes. When compared to the result announced by INEC, however, the outcome was startling. The INEC results showed that Obi (LP) scored 1,033.56 per cent of votes across the 36 states and the FCT, Bola Ahmed Tinubu (APC) got 1,307.61 per cent, while Atiku Abubakar (PDP) went home with 1,046.15 per cent votes.
Nwankwo acknowledged that the method was not perfect, but it could provide the best estimate in a system that is fraught with manipulations. He hoped that his study would draw attention to the need for electoral reforms in Nigeria, where free and fair elections have been elusive for years.