BBC Africa revealed a report indicating that rigging happened in Rivers State on February 25, 2023. According to @BBCAfrica, Peter Obi’s votes were drastically reduced in Rivers State; and other parts of the country.
According to a BBC news post on “Nigeria election: The mystery of the altered results in disputed poll”, the media house used Rivers State as a case study. A BBC investigation revealed that there is evidence suggesting manipulation in some results from Nigeria’s presidential election. There is a need to question the identity of an election official who read out some of the unexplained results.
Discovery in Rivers State Election on February 25, 2023.
BBC investigation shows that the voting tally sheets from over 6,000 polling units (PUs) stations in Rivers State where oppositions complained. Our results contradict the official result announced by INEC.
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu of All Progressive Congress (APC) as the winner. Meanwhile, BBC’s counting shows Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) won by a wide margin.
BBC Votes Counts Vs Declared Vote Counts in Rivers State Capital
From the above photo, Bola Ahmed Tibunu received an increase of over 106,000 in the state-declared vote counts, which is almost doubling his total in the state. Contrarily, BBC’s investigation reveals a reduction of over 50,000 in Peter Obi’s vote counts.
BBC Noted:
It’s important to make clear that although we searched through the election website for every single one of the 6,866 polling stations in Rivers state, we were not able to obtain results from all of them.
For about 5% of polling stations, the photos of tally sheets were too blurred for us to read. It’s reasonable to assume that the official count would have included these as they would have had the original documents.
In another 17%, there were no results at all. Many of these would have been places where no voting took place due to security issues or the non-arrival of voting materials. Others had technical problems preventing officials from uploading the documents.
So there clearly would have been more polling stations included in the final official results that weren’t included in the BBC investigation.
However, these additional tally sheets would have increased the totals for each party, not decreased them. And what we found was that the votes for Peter Obi’s Labour Party had decreased sharply in Rivers State.
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