The African Democratic Congress has declared that it will document, collate and publish polling unit results during the 2027 general elections, directly challenging a warning by the Independent National Electoral Commission against the circulation of privately compiled figures.
In a statement issued on Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party said its position rests on the constitutional right to freedom of expression, which it argued is not extinguished by the Electoral Act’s conferment of result declaration powers on INEC. “Although we recognise INEC’s responsibility to make official declarations of results and to declare winners of elections, that responsibility cannot reasonably abrogate the right of citizens to collect and collate election results and to share them,” the party said. “Our agents will document results, our structures will collate them, and we will communicate verified figures to the public, clearly identifying their source and status.”
The statement was a direct response to INEC Chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan, who warned at a national stakeholders’ meeting in Abuja on Tuesday marking 100 days to the 2027 polls that media organisations and political parties must not announce results from privately collated figures. “Resist the declaration of privately collated results, because under the Electoral Act, the authority to declare results rests exclusively with the Commission in national elections,” Amupitan said. “It is far more important to be right than to be the first.”
The confrontation unfolds against a contested legal and political backdrop. The Electoral Act 2026, signed into law by President Bola Tinubu on February 18, 2026, was amended after the National Assembly rejected a proposal to make electronic transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal mandatory. The amended Section 60(3) permits presiding officers to transmit results electronically after Form EC8A is signed, but provides that Form EC8A shall serve as the primary and authoritative document for collation where network failure occurs. The Presidency has defended the law as allowing real-time transmission while recognising practical connectivity limitations, and has accused opposition parties of waging a war of disinformation against the National Assembly and the administration.
The ADC’s insistence on independent collation is not isolated. Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, disclosed in September 2026 that his campaign would deploy a “dual transmission” system, receiving results from polling units to its own situation room alongside INEC’s official platform. Obi said the arrangement was intended to ensure that results declared at the end of the process could be traced to what was recorded at polling units, citing the controversy over IReV’s performance during the 2023 presidential election. Abdullahi confirmed that the ADC was also building independent collation capacity and would not entrust the process entirely to INEC.
The roots of this distrust are traceable to the 2023 general elections, when INEC’s IReV portal suffered technical glitches that affected the upload of presidential results, leaving the three leading candidates claiming victory. INEC declared Tinubu the winner and the courts affirmed his victory, but the episode entrenched a perception among opposition parties that the manual collation chain between polling units and ward centres remains the weakest link in Nigeria’s election results management process. Parallel vote tabulation by civil society organisations, including Yiaga Africa, has historically served as a verification mechanism, but the line between observation, projection and official declaration has become increasingly blurred. A Guardian analysis noted that the growing number of independent data-gathering initiatives risks creating an environment where several actors produce different figures within minutes, fuelling suspicion and misinformation.
The 2027 election timetable adds urgency to the dispute. INEC has fixed the presidential and National Assembly elections for January 16, 2027, and the governorship and state assembly polls for February 6, 2027. The national voter register now stands at more than 103 million, following the conclusion of a three-phase Continuous Voter Registration exercise that attracted over 10.7 million new registrants. INEC has acquired 57,000 additional Bimodal Voter Accreditation System devices with inbuilt batteries and has established a dedicated Artificial Intelligence Division to detect result anomalies and combat deepfakes.
The ADC, now the leading opposition platform after Atiku Abubakar won its presidential ticket in May 2026 with 1,846,379 votes, has consistently accused INEC of tilting the electoral process in favour of the ruling All Progressives Congress. The party’s campaign council has demanded decentralised PVC collection and cautioned INEC against partiality. Atiku himself has pledged to end election rigging and strengthen INEC’s independence if elected, and to support the prompt publication of results from every polling unit.
What the law permits and what the law prohibits remains the central question. INEC insists that only it can declare results, and its warning is grounded in the Electoral Act. The ADC insists that collecting, collating and sharing information is a constitutional right that no electoral statute can reasonably abolish. Both positions are now on a collision course, with less than four months to the first ballot. How INEC and the courts navigate that collision will shape not only the credibility of the 2027 elections but also the public’s confidence in the numbers they see on their screens before the official declaration is made.