Recent research has revealed that the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Gregory Obi, won the presidential election held on February 25, 2023, at all military installations and environs where thugs and hooligans do not have access or free reign.
This was disclosed in an in-depth research work conducted by Dr. Obioma C. Nwankwo, entitled “Assessing the likely winner of the 2023 Nigeria presidential election using the voting patterns at military installations and environs“.
The researcher took a scientific path to analysing the elections by selecting only the results from military formations across Nigeria’s 36 states.
He said he did this because he was sure that those were locations where nobody could attempt ballot snatching or result sheet mutilation in the Polling Units.
From his results, Peter Obi won the presidential election even in places like Bauchi.
The election in Nigeria, which had been adjudged by local and international observers as faulty and deplorable, was fraught with manipulation of results, underage voting, voter intimidation and voter suppression.
The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the electronic transmission of results from Polling Units was introduced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) aimed at minimizing rigging.
The failure to electronically transmit the results from polling units during the recent presidential election as promised by INEC, however, led to wide-spread belief of result-tampering making it difficult to know the true number of votes scored by the candiates.
Dr. Nwankwo, therefore, 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.
According to him, the voting results from locations where it is almost impossible for voter suppression, intimidation, underage voting and the manipulation of results to occur could be used to estimate the true number of votes scored by the candiates.
He said: “This method is not perfect, but could provide the best estimate in a system that is fraught with manipulations.
“Military installations and their immediate sorroundings meet these criteria because they are arguably the best locations where the integrity of the election results can 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.
“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.
“The official INEC result-reporting website was used for this study. The results from military installations and the immediate environment was obtained as follows:
Visit the INEC result reporting page: https://www.inecelectionresults.ng/elections and select the presidental election.
Then go to each state, local government and ward.
Look through all the polling units contained in a ward for keywords that denote a military installation or a close proximity to one. These keywords are words like army, navy, air force, barracks, NAOWA (Nigerian Army Officers’ Wives Association).
Document 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.
An alternative website, https://cvr.inecnigeria.org/election_results/findByCode, can also be used to check for election results if the polling unit code is known.”
Out of the total of 176,846 polling units, some 167,443 results have been uploaded as of the time of this publication.
Nwankwo continued: “The process involves browsing through almost all the polling units.
“It is possible that a few polling units with military installations were missed during the collection of data. However, none was intentionally excluded.
“The results of the voting results at military installations and the immediate sorroundings and those declared by INEC for the entire state are presented in the table below:
The total shows that Peter 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 juxtaposed with the result announced by INEC, however, the outcome is startling.
The INEC results show that Peter 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.
