Explainer: Election results collation chain that decides Nigeria’s president

By Omeiza Ajayi ABUJA – Nigeria’s president is not declared on the strength of a single national count. A chain of collation officers, each signing for the votes below them, builds the result from the polling unit up to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. Read Also: *Explainer: What INEC’s 2023 results in Lagos, Oyo, Osun actually reveal *Why getting most votes is not enough to become Nigeria’s president The chain starts when voting ends.

Voters are accredited with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, and the presiding officer counts the ballots in public and enters each party’s score on Form EC8A, the polling unit result sheet. The presiding officer signs the form, and polling agents who are present countersign it. A poster version, Form EC60E, is pasted at the polling unit so voters can see what was recorded.

Collation then moves upward. INEC’s then chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, described the 2023 process as running through “four levels”: ward, local government area, LGA, state and national. At each level, an officer adds up the forms from the level below and records the total on a new form. The election results forms The ward collation officer adds up the Form EC8A sheets in the ward and records the total on Form EC8B.

The LGA collation officer then adds up the ward sheets on Form EC8C. At state level, the State Collation Officer for the Presidential Election (SCOPE) adds up the LGA results on Form EC8D. Katsina in 2023 shows what that form contains: 3,516,719 registered voters; 1,097,663 accredited; 1,058,673 valid votes, and 32,514 rejected. Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, led with 489,045 votes against 482,283 for Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, APC.

The national stage takes place in Abuja, with the INEC Chairman acting as returning officer for the presidential election. That office is now held by Joash Amupitan, who succeeded Yakubu in October 2025. In 2023, Yakubu set out the procedure at the national collation centre, where each state’s SCOPE presents the original Form EC8D. “When all the SCOPES have presented their results,” the returning officer displays the sealed copies of Form EC8DA, the state-by-state summary, and Form EC8E, the declaration sheet.

Polling agents are invited to comment before the winner is declared, and each agent receives duplicate copies afterwards. Declaring winner Declaring the winner involves more than adding up votes. The returning officer must also confirm that the candidate with the highest total reached one-quarter of the votes in enough states, as Section 134 of the Constitution requires.

The 2023 totals show the arithmetic. Yakubu put registered voters at 93,469,008; accredited voters at 25,286,616; valid votes at 24,025,940, and rejected votes at 939,278. Tinubu polled 8,794,726; Atiku 6,984,520; Peter Obi of the Labour Party, LP, 6,101,533, and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP, 1,496,687. On the spread test, Tinubu’s lawyers told the election petition court that he scored 25 per cent in 29 states.

They said Atiku managed that in 21 states and Obi in 16 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, FCT. Those figures come from Tinubu’s final written address, not from INEC’s declaration. Electronic transmission Electronic transmission has been the most contested part of the chain. INEC uploads polling unit sheets to its Result Viewing Portal, IReV.

But under the Electoral Act 2022 the Supreme Court held that the portal is a public viewing tool, not a legal collation system. The court found that failure to upload could not by itself invalidate the 2023 election. The Electoral Act 2026, which President Tinubu signed in February, changes the wording. Section 60(3) requires presiding officers to transmit Form EC8A to IReV.

But where transmission fails because of communication failure, the signed Form EC8A remains the primary basis for collation and declaration. Senate Leader Opeyemi Bamidele has described the section as mandating electronic transmission. Critics say the proviso keeps manual collation as the controlling record. Who signs at each level, and what the form says, will matter most if the figures are challenged.

Declaring the 2023 result, Yakubu said Tinubu was elected “having satisfied the requirements of the law.”