The African Democratic Congress (ADC) says it no longer trusts the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to protect its votes in the 2027 general elections.
The party’s National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, stated this on Monday during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today.
Abdullahi said the party was making arrangements to independently collate its votes, citing what he described as previous technical issues with the electronic transmission of election results.
“Don’t forget that I ran for Senate in the 2023 election. What many of us did, and not only myself, was that we trusted INEC when they told us there would be automatic transmission of results to the IReV.
“Then what happened afterwards? They said that, due to some technical glitch, the results could not be transmitted automatically to the IReV. So we have been beaten by that, and we are now twice shy. We say we will not allow it to happen again. We are no longer naive.
“We can no longer trust INEC to protect our votes for us. We are saying that we will vigilantly guard our own votes. We will protect our own votes.
“If the results at the end of the day reflect the true votes that came from the polling units, we will accept them. But if they do not, we are not going to accept them. We are making provisions to collate our own votes,” he said.
The ADC has previously raised concerns about aspects of the 2027 electoral process, including the distribution of Permanent Voter Cards, and said it would mobilise its structures to monitor the process and document complaints from voters.
