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Did Tinubu win the presidential poll? ‘Obidients’ do alternative collation of results

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March 17, 2023
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Who won the 2023 presidential election? The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) but the opposition parties kicked, with Peter Obi (Labour Party) and Atiku Abubakar (Peoples Democratic Party) both claiming to have won.

Mahmood Yakubu, chairman of the INEC, said Tinubu secured 8,794,726 votes and was elected president.

Atiku had the second-highest figure with 6,984,520 votes, while Obi was third with 6,101,533 votes.

The major reason for the rejection of the official results was INEC’s failure to upload the result sheets real-time to IReV, its dedicated portal, despite promising for months that it would do so.

Given that the result sheets of the national assembly elections that were held simultaneously were uploaded to IReV, there was suspicion that something went wrong.

INEC blamed it on the technical hitches involved in uploading over 176,000 PDFs to the portal which it said it did not foresee in previous trials in governorship elections.

Supporters of Obi and Atiku insist there was something sinister.

IT’S STILL TINUBU — BUT WITH PLENTY CAVEATS

When over 90 percent of the result sheets were eventually uploaded to the IReV, supporters of Obi — referred to as “Obidients” — set out to do the computation by themselves to compare with what was announced by INEC.

The supporters’ group, which was led by @markessien on Twitter, used a combination of humans and bots to harvest the results.

But Essien and his team of hundreds of volunteers released data that still put Tinubu ahead with 7,336,869 votes, followed by Obi (and not Atiku) with 5,309,609 votes.

Atiku got 5,291,290 votes and placed third.

However, there are a number of caveats.

For one, some result sheets were blurred, meaning they were not properly scanned before they were uploaded. They could not access the data.

Also, results from many polling units were not found. Some results were also not properly recognised by the bots, leading to wrong figures being pulled out.




“Here is a link to the results for the Nigeria Presidential 2023 results, in excel format. This has the result for each polling unit, as well as a link the PDF file on INEC website. Please take note – the data is not 100% accurate,” Essien Tweeted.

“There are many mistakes in the data. However, in this format, it should be easy for any group to quickly clean up the data on a state-by-state level.

“There are 3 files for each state – one is “crosschecked” (we have multiple data points). One is “unsure” (we think there is error).

“The last file is ‘not found’. We could not find a result sheet for this polling unit.

“As said before – the results here are strictly for assisting data analysts. They should not be used to extrapolate the results of the election. They still need heavy cleanup.

“However, our hope is that releasing these results will aid the legal examination of the election, and help us get to the final truth about what really happened.

“We thank all the people who assisted in entering numbers, your work towards transparency is helping our country.”

THE RIVERS BETWEEN

One major highlight of this self-effort was the difference in the result declared in Rivers state.

While INEC announced 231,591 for Tinubu, 175,071 for Obi and 88,468 for Atiku, the Obidients, from their own calculations, got 219,060 for Obi, 119,640 for Tinubu and 74,996 for Atiku.

Although this would not impact on the overall result, they are making the argument that a similar thing might have happened in other states.

But from the figures collated by “Obidients” themselves, Obi too appeared to have got less than what INEC declared for him in the south-east.

In Anambra state, INEC declared 584,621 votes for Obi but the “Obidients” tallied 379,889 — a massive 200,000 difference. Tinubu’s lawyers might be looking into this and others.

A similar case was seen in Enugu state — INEC recorded 428,640 for Obi but “Obidients” calculated 337,008 instead, about 100,000 votes lower.

In Imo state, INEC said Obi scored 360,495 but the “Obidients” tallied 247,947, more than 100,000 less.

STILL, NO FINAL ANSWER

Many crawling and computation errors were pointed out by commenters on Twitter, some of whom alleged that the figures had already been tampered with, insisting Obi won.

However, there is every chance the legal teams of Obi and Atiku will use the raw result scripts, rather than the ones uploaded to the IReV, to do their own calculations.

Tinubu is also filing a cross appeal, meaning he will challenge the results declared in some states, particularly where his opponents were declared winners.

Below are some of the comments.








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