The presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), Peter Obi, has said his campaign team would deploy an independent system to transmit election results from every polling unit to its situation room during the 2027 presidential election.
Obi disclosed this in an exclusive interview on ARISE News, where he explained measures his team intends to adopt to ensure that votes are properly counted, recorded and transmitted during the election.
According to him, the proposed system would operate alongside the official transmission process of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), allowing his team to independently receive and verify results generated at polling units.
He said: “We must make sure that at every polling unit, the votes are counted, recorded properly and transmitted properly. And we will even have a dual transmission so that as it’s going to the proper designated INEC portal, it’s also being transmitted where the people can see it.”
He said the initiative was designed to provide an independent mechanism for monitoring results from the grassroots and verifying the eventual outcome of the election.
“All we are saying is that this time around, we will make sure that in every polling unit, we must have a system that transmits to our situation room the correct results,” he said.
The former Anambra State governor said the measure would help prevent discrepancies between results recorded at polling units and figures subsequently announced at higher levels of the electoral process.
He added that other organisations were also likely to establish similar mechanisms for independent monitoring of the election.
“And I’m sure there’s so many other agencies that intend to do the same thing. So, we’re not going to have a situation where somebody just pronounces something that didn’t emanate from the polling unit,” Obi said.
He stressed that the objective was to ensure that the results declared at the end of the electoral process accurately reflected the votes cast and recorded at polling units.
“I want us to make sure that the right things are done. There’s nothing difficult in having a simple, free, transparent election. It happens in Ghana, it happens everywhere,” he said.
Obi’s comments come as political parties and stakeholders begin preparations for the 2027 general election, with electronic transmission and independent monitoring of polling-unit results expected to remain key issues in discussions around electoral transparency and credibility.
The NDC candidate’s proposed parallel results-transmission system would, if implemented, provide his team with real-time access to polling-unit results and an additional means of comparing independently received figures with those officially transmitted through INEC’s electoral system.
