ADC Questions INEC's Ability to Protect Its Votes Ahead of 2027

The African Democratic Congress, ADC, has said it does not have confidence in the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to protect its votes in the 2027 general elections. The party's National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, made the position known on Monday during an appearance on Channels Television's Politics Today. He said the party is setting up mechanisms to compile its own vote count, and he warned that technical failures at INEC weaken trust. Abdullahi recalled that he contested a Senate seat in the 2023 election. He said he and many others had relied on INEC's assurance that results would be sent electronically to the IReV without manual intervention. After the election, he said, INEC blamed a technical glitch for the results not being delivered automatically to the IReV. That experience, he said, has made the party cautious and unwilling to let it happen again. He stated that the party is no longer naive and cannot continue to trust INEC to defend its votes. The ADC, he added, will watch over its ballots carefully and protect its own votes. If the final results reflect the actual votes cast at polling units, the party will accept them, he said. If they do not, it will not accept them. He said the party is making plans to compile its own tally of votes.