Claim: A post by Joe Igbokwe, a chieftain of All Progressives Congress (APC), shows a breakdown of votes reportedly scored by the former Lagos State Governor, Bola Tinubu, in each state at the just concluded presidential primary.
The claim is false. The election was a secret ballot and votes were not tallied according to states.
Full Text
Following the emergence of Bola Tinubu as the flagbearer of APC for the 2023 presidential election, some social media users including a chieftain of APC in Lagos State have been circulating data to depict how delegates from each state voted for the former Lagos State governor.
Mr Tinubu during the primary polled 1271 votes to clinch the ticket ahead of former minister of transportation Rotimi Amaechi, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Senate President Ahmad Lawan and other candidates.
In the spirit of victory, some of Mr Tinubu’s supporters shared data to show the percentage of votes the former governor got from delegates from each state.
The data which was broken into the six geopolitical zones had different states with different percentages of votes.
While some users believe the data to be genuine, others questioned Mr Igbokwe’s source, prompting DUBAWA to fact-check.
Verification
DUBAWA discovered that only elected national and Ad-hoc delegates were qualified to vote at the National convention. A total of 2, 260 delegates were accredited for the election.
One of the video clips of the election obtained by DUBAWA showed that the delegates cast their votes in any of the 40 ballot boxes made available at the convention ground.
DUBAWA observed that none of the ballot boxes were dedicated to any state; hence it is difficult to determine the delegates that voted for each candidate.
It was also observed that the election was a secret ballot where delegates were allowed to choose their preferred candidate without others knowing.
Cambridge dictionary defines secret ballot “as a method of voting in which each person writes their choice on a piece of paper so that no one else knows how they have voted.”
A close observation of the video of the voting exercise for the APC presidential primary shows that it is impossible to determine the percentage of people that voted for Tinubu in each state because the delegates were dropping their votes secretly in different ballots boxes.
Conclusion
The post showing a breakdown of how delegates in each state voted for Bola Tinubu is false. DUBAWA discovered that the election was a secret ballot and votes were not tallied on a state-by-state basis.
