The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has declared that it will independently document, collate and publish polling-unit results during the 2027 general elections, despite a warning from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) against the publication of privately collated results.
The opposition party, however, said it would not attempt to usurp INEC’s statutory authority to declare official election results and announce winners.
The ADC made its position known on Thursday in a statement signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, in response to comments by INEC Chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan, cautioning political parties and other actors against presenting privately collated figures as official results.
The party said its agents and grassroots structures would record results directly from polling units, transmit the information through its own internal system and make the collated figures available to the public.
The ADC argued that political parties and citizens have the right to document electoral proceedings and communicate information obtained from polling units, provided such figures are clearly distinguished from the official results declared by INEC.
“We are aware of our rights to freedom of expression under the Constitution. We are also aware of the limitations associated with those rights,” the party said, maintaining that its right to collate and share election results was not extinguished by INEC’s constitutional responsibility.
The party said it would clearly identify its figures as independently collated results and would not present them as an alternative declaration of winners.
That distinction is likely to become increasingly important as Nigeria heads towards the 2027 elections, when political parties, election observers, civil society organisations and citizens are expected to deploy digital tools to monitor voting and collate results in real time.
INEC remains the legally recognised body responsible for conducting federal and state elections and declaring winners through the prescribed electoral process.
The disagreement therefore centres less on whether INEC has the power to declare official results — a responsibility the ADC expressly recognises — and more on whether political parties and citizens can independently collect and publish information from polling units.
The issue carries particular weight in Nigeria’s electoral environment, where disputes over results, collation processes and transparency have repeatedly shaped public confidence in elections.
For the ADC, publishing its own polling-unit figures would provide voters and the wider public with an additional source of information against which the official process could be scrutinised.
For INEC, however, the challenge is to prevent unofficial figures from being mistaken for certified results and thereby creating confusion during a sensitive period of result collation.
With the 2027 election fast approaching, the emerging confrontation over who can collect, publish and characterise election results is set to become another major test of Nigeria’s electoral transparency framework.