Osun: Stronger Competition Raises Cost Of Election Manipulation – AEO

The 2026 Osun State governorship election has reinforced the importance of strong political competition as a safeguard for electoral integrity, according to the Athena Election Observatory (AEO).

In its assessment comparing the 2026 election with the 2022 governorship poll, the observatory said the organised political competition made electoral manipulation more difficult by requiring political parties to deploy agents, understand electoral procedures and independently track results from polling units through the various levels of collation.

The AEO said such capacity was expensive to build, but where competing parties possessed it on a large scale, attempts to manipulate results became harder to execute without detection.

The observatory also noted a significant increase in the size of Osun’s electorate between the two elections.

According to its figures, registered voters increased from 1,952,387 in 2022 to 2,339,544 in 2026, representing a 19.8 per cent rise.

Accredited voters also rose from 827,218 to 1,010,684, while votes cast increased from 823,124 to 1,005,800. Despite the increase in participation, the accreditation rate moved only marginally from 42.37 per cent in 2022 to 43.20 per cent in 2026.

The AEO said the expansion in the absolute number of participating voters, alongside a broadly stable accreditation rate, had implications for vote-buying and other forms of electoral manipulation.

“For anyone seeking to influence an election through large-scale retail vote buying, a larger and competitively mobilised electorate can raise both the cost and uncertainty of the exercise,” it said.

The observatory said the increased votes secured by the two leading contenders also reflected the intensity of the 2026 contest.

It noted that Governor Ademola Adeleke’s votes increased from 403,371 in 2022 to 511,067 in 2026, while the All Progressives Congress (APC) increased its votes from 375,027 to 444,815.

Despite the stronger performance by both sides, the declared margin widened from 28,344 votes in 2022 to 66,252 votes in 2026, resulting in what the observatory described as a competitive election with a clear declared margin.

The AEO also commended improvements in the deployment of election technology, particularly the use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), the uploading of polling-unit results through the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal and structured result entry.

It said the systems were increasingly creating an auditable trail from polling units, although challenges remained.

“Upload delays, transparency around transmission timelines, system resilience, and reconciliation across different digital records all require further work,” the observatory said.

It added, however, that the overall direction of electoral technology was encouraging.

The AEO stressed that its work would not end with the declaration of the winner, saying the next phase would focus on a detailed post-election audit.

“We now move to the more rigorous work of post-election audit: completing the polling-unit dataset, obtaining BVAS accreditation data and Forms EC8B-E, and reconciling the electoral record from polling unit through successive levels of collation to INEC’s final declaration,” it said.

The observatory said its objective was not to determine who should have won the election, stressing that voters had cast their ballots and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had exercised its statutory responsibility to declare the winner.

“We are not asking who should have won. Voters have voted, and INEC has exercised its statutory responsibility to declare the winner,” the AEO said.