Presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), Peter Obi, has disclosed intentions to establish an independent method to communicate election results from every polling station to his team’s situation room during the 2027 presidential election.
We will have a parallel mechanism to the official result transmission method of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC),’ Obi said in an interview with ARISE News on Thursday.
He said the aim is to make sure votes are correctly tallied, recorded and communicated from the polling places, while providing his team an independent way of verification of the results.
“We have to make sure that at all polling units, the votes are counted, the votes are recorded correctly, the votes are transmitted correctly. And we will have even a dual transmission so that as it’s going to the correct designated INEC portal, it’s also being sent where the public can see it’, Obi said.
The former governor of Anambra State said his team will guarantee that every polling unit has a technology to send results obtained at the place straight to its situation room.
“All what we are saying is that this time around, we will make sure that in every polling units, we must have a system that transmits the correct results to our own situation room,” he said.
The suggestion was meant to improve openness and avoid anomalies between the results recorded at the polling locations and the data to be announced subsequently at higher levels, Obi said.
The system, he claimed, would make it harder to publish election results that were not coming from the polling places where the votes were cast.
And I’m sure there’s tonnes of other agencies that are going to do the same thing. “So, we are not going to have a situation where somebody just pronounces something that did not emanate from the polling unit,” Obi added.
The NDC candidate was also challenged if his idea meant creating a parallel method for the transmission of results outside of the official INEC procedure.
Obi dismissed such interpretation, saying the approach he suggested would be an independent monitoring and verification mechanism and would not replace the official INEC process.
He said the focus should be on ensuring accurate documentation of the results generated at polling sites and that they were verifiable.
The idea comes as political parties and other stakeholders step up preparations for the 2027 general elections, with electronic transmission and the reliability of polling-unit results certain to remain big concerns in the electoral discourse.
Obi gave examples of other countries that Nigeria can hold elections that are free, transparent and credible.
“Nothing is difficult in having a simple, free, transparent election. “It happens in Ghana, it happens everywhere,” he remarked.
“Other organisations may come up with comparable monitoring mechanisms”, he stated, indicating that it should not be only the political parties that independently verify the outcomes.
His comments come as there is renewed discourse on electoral reforms and the use of technology to boost the credibility of Nigeria’s elections.
The former governor has frequently portrayed the 2027 election in the light of the necessity to ensuring that votes cast by Nigerians are correctly counted and preserved.
He also explained what he meant by saying he was ready to “die” for his votes during the same interview on ARISE News, which Obi said was a symbolic way of expressing his commitment to defending the mandate of voters and was not meant to incite violence.
His bigger goal was to make sure that Nigerians could vote in an election where the votes cast at polling units were the ones that counted, he said in an interview with the AP.
With the presidential race of 2027 already in the works, Obi’s proposed dual-transmission system is likely to stoke an increasingly acrimonious argument about electronic result transmission, independent election monitoring and the role of political parties in confirming polling-unit results.
Obi’s message is clear; results declared at the end of an election must be traceable to what voters actually wrote at the polling booths.
About the Author
