Rivers East and Obio/Akpor
IReV Count Investigation

Key findings

The IReV count and the official returns name different winners

MundX counted the candidate votes on the polling-unit result sheets available on INEC’s IReV portal. LP leads the available count in both Rivers East Senate and Obio/Akpor House of Representatives. INEC’s official lists name PDP candidates as the elected members. S01 · S05 · S06

1. LP leads both available IReV counts. LP has 93,191 votes to PDP’s 80,148 in Rivers East Senate, and 67,320 to PDP’s 36,542 in Obio/Akpor House.

2. INEC returned PDP candidates in both contests. Onyesoh Allwell Heacho was returned for Rivers East and Chinda Kingsley Ogundu for Obio/Akpor. S05 · S06

3. The reported Rivers East declaration moves in the opposite direction. An INEC statement reported by Guardian and TheCable gives PDP 134,283 and LP 74,725. S03 · S04

4. Incomplete Senate coverage does not explain the difference in the model. Reconstructing the 653 missing or unusable polling units produces an estimated full tally of LP 118,355 and PDP 107,334.

5. The House lead is much larger than the likely missing vote pool. The 44 missing House polling units have an estimated 7,669 valid votes, against an observed LP lead of 30,778.

01 · IReV count and declarations

Two contests, two different winners depending on the record being read

The table separates three things: the leader in the polling-unit sheets available on IReV, the candidate officially returned by INEC, and any numerical declaration located in a public source. A missing declaration figure is shown as a dash, not zero.

The Rivers East declaration figures come from an INEC statement reported independently by Guardian and TheCable. For Obio/Akpor, INEC’s members-elect list confirms the returned candidate, but MundX has not located the official numerical declaration form online. A secondary archive lists PDP 60,899 and LP 18,766; those figures are not presented here as certified INEC totals. S03 · S04 · S06 · S07

02 · Candidate vote tallies

Every candidate in the available polling-unit count, first to last

Only parties with candidates on INEC’s final list are included. The figures are sums of candidate cells read from available polling-unit result sheets. S01 · S02

Four Rivers East forms used the full label “ACCORD”; those four votes are normalised to party code A. Values read into rows for parties without candidates were excluded rather than treated as votes.

03 · The coverage question

Could the 653 missing Rivers East units change the IReV-count winner?

Rivers East had a usable Senate count for 2,850 of 3,503 expected polling units, or 81.36%. MundX therefore reconstructed the likely vote volume and party distribution of the 653 missing or unusable units.

The model is a coverage test: it asks whether the missing polling units, under geographically informed assumptions, are sufficient to change the leader in the IReV count. It does not reproduce the legal collation process.

04 · Reconstruction method

Three elections supply different parts of the same polling-unit estimate

The Senate and House elections took place on the same day. The governorship election was held three weeks later, but its registered-voter field should describe the same polling-unit register. MundX matched records by exact polling-unit code, never by name alone.

1. Registered voters. Use the exact-PU field from House, governorship or another matching record. If sources materially disagree, discard the conflict and use the same-ward mean.

2. Accredited voters. Use the same-day House figure when available. Otherwise apply the ward’s aggregate accredited-to-registered rate, followed by an LGA fallback.

3. Valid-vote volume. Apply the observed relationship between accreditation and valid votes in linked records.

4. Party allocation. Use aggregate candidate shares from quality-screened Senate sheets in the same ward. Seventy-four polling units without a usable ward sample use the LGA share.

Of the 653 units, 457 use a ward turnout rate and 73 use an LGA turnout rate. The downloadable polling-unit file identifies the source used for every reconstructed value.

05 · Estimated full tally

The model still places LP first in Rivers East

Figures are rounded to whole votes. Only PDP and LP have a numerical declaration benchmark in the public INEC statement located for this investigation.

The IReV column sums non-negative candidate-party cells from completed polling-unit sheets. Rows for parties without a Rivers East candidate are excluded from candidate totals.

06 · Missing-unit geography

Most of the missing vote volume is concentrated in four LGAs

Port Harcourt, Ikwerre, Etche and Obio/Akpor account for 573 of the 653 missing polling units and about 91% of the estimated missing valid votes.

LGA values are rounded after polling-unit estimation, so displayed party rows can differ from the district candidate totals by a few votes. The downloadable ward file contains all 72 affected wards.

07 · Sensitivity tests

Changing the assumptions changes the margin, not the leader

These are scenario checks, not statistical confidence intervals. They test different geographic party-share pools and different assumptions about vote volume in the missing polling units.

08 · Obio/Akpor House

The 44 missing House polling units are not large enough to plausibly close LP’s IReV-count lead

The House count covers 1,167 of 1,211 polling units. LP leads PDP by 30,778 votes in the available IReV tally. The 44 missing or unusable polling units have an estimated 32,861 registered voters and about 7,669 valid votes at reconstructed turnout.

Registration was recovered directly for 37 of the 44 polling units and ward-imputed for seven. Same-day Senate accreditation was usable for nine; the remaining 35 use observed House turnout rates from the same ward.

Sources and data notes

Public records and downloadable reconstruction files

For Rivers East, Guardian and TheCable published the scores in an INEC statement, and INEC’s senators-elect list confirms the returned candidate. For Obio/Akpor, INEC’s members-elect list confirms the returned candidate, but MundX has not located the official numerical declaration form online.

• S01INEC IReV portalSource of the polling-unit result sheets counted in this investigation.
• S02INEC final candidate listCandidate-party validation for the Senate and House contests.
• S03Guardian · INEC statementReports PDP 134,283 and LP 74,725 in Rivers East; published 4 March 2023.
• S04TheCable · INEC statementIndependent publication of the same Rivers East Senate figures.
• S05INEC senators-elect listConfirms Onyesoh Allwell Heacho, PDP, for Rivers East.
• S06INEC House members-elect listConfirms Chinda Kingsley Ogundu, PDP, for Obio/Akpor.
• S07CivicHive secondary House archiveLists PDP 60,899, LP 18,766, APC 5,932 and SDP 1,497 for Obio/Akpor; not an official declaration form.

Download the analysis data