ELECTION RIGGING NIGERIAN STYLE

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 ABUJA 000793 SIPDIS SIPDIS DOE FOR CAROLYN GAY E.O. 12958: DECL: 04/24/2017 TAGS: PGOV KDEM KCOR NI SUBJECT: ELECTION RIGGING NIGERIAN STYLE REF: A. ABUJA 767 ¶B. ABUJA 666 AND PREVIOUS ABUJA 00000793 001.2 OF 004 Classified By: Ambassador John Campbell for reasons 1.4 (b & d). ¶1. (C) Summary: Governor Yar'Adua of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) was pronounced by INEC to be the winner of Nigeria's April 21 presidential election. However, fraud and mismanagement plagued the poll at every stage, and it is therefore impossible to assert any meaningful relationship between the announced results and the will of the people. Mission Nigeria has identified three levels of the process where mismanagement and fraud made it difficult, if not impossible, for the election to produce a legitimate result. Examples of problems at all three levels, which we are calling "retail, wholesale, and factory direct," are detailed below. End summary. "Retail" Level Fraud -------------- ¶2. (C) Retail election rigging happens at the individual polling station. Nigeria has over 120,000 polling stations and while observers were not present at all of them, international observers did cover a significant sample. Because observers had better access to polling sites than to the various collation and counting levels, many of the retail problems were witnessed directly. The ruling party had an advantage at retail rigging due to its control over INEC, the security services, and many state and local governments, but "competitive rigging" by opposition supporters also occurred. Fraud at the polling station level is not necessarily directed from above; it may be the work of an overzealous local party strongman. Retail rigging includes underage voting; intimidation of voters by thugs or security personnel (either to keep legitimate voters away or to encourage those in line to vote for the "correct" party); ballot box stuffing; vote buying; theft of ballot boxes; and "padding" the vote count at an individual station. It may be committed by party hacks manning the poll in place of INEC staff, or legitimate INEC staff may be partisan or subject to bribery or intimidation and go along with the fraud. ¶3. (C) Mission observers witnessed brazen examples of retail rigging around Nigeria. Some examples include: --In Nsukka (Enugu) observers saw a polling station that was clearly being run by a known local PDP strongwoman. The station had been open less than 20 minutes, yet the ballot box was half full. The poll workers did not use the voters' register or check registration cards; they did not stamp ballots or ink voters' fingers. There was no privacy for voters, and all votes observed were for PDP. The PDP strongwoman told a Nigerian embassy employee in Igbo that the observers should leave, and as they left, people who had voted previously rejoined the queue. --In Abakaliki (Ebonyi),Econoff saw an open ballot box containing a large clump of presidential ballots, obviously stuffed. --Mission observers saw the Enugu Secretary to the State Government steal a ballot box in Opi. At another station observers visited in Enugu town, the poll opened at 14:55 but the ballot box was removed by soldiers at 15:50 after only 42 of about 200 people in the queue (of 1,800 registered voters) had cast ballots. British observers saw books of ballots that had been pre-thumbprinted for PDP in Ayiere (Enugu). -- In Benue, Mission and other international observers witnessed cases of ballot snatching, ballot box stuffing, intimidation, and delivery of voting material by PDP party agents (including the Governor's brother). --Endemic underage voting was observed in Katsina, Sokoto, and Zamfara States. At one station in Katsina metropolis, Mission personnel observed a group of irate children hound PDP party agents when they refused to pay them for casting PDP votes. --In Maeltideba (outside Gombe city),residents told Mission ABUJA 00000793 002.2 OF 004 observers an INEC person came earlier in the day with one box of ballots, allowed two people to vote, then announced voting had finished and left with the materials. -- In Bauchi city, a polling official continued to authenticate the remaining ballots (stamping and signing the back to make them valid for voting) as he spoke to observers, even though he said he expected no more voters to arrive. The observers suspect the authenticated ballots ended up in the box once they left. --In Ijebu-Igbo (Ogun),Mission observers visited a polling station that opened at 14:00 and began its final vote count at 14:30 -- in which time 600 voters ostensibly had cast their ballots. However, no voters could be found nearby. The PDP won 279 of 362 votes for the presidency and 566 of 600 votes for the House of Representatives. (Note: The station had received exactly 362 presidential ballots and 600 House ballots.) Curiously, the same "thumbprint," which was a half-inch dot, identically marked each ballot. "Wholesale" Level Fraud -------------- ¶4. (C) Election fraud at the wholesale level involves the inflation (or creation from whole cloth) of election results from lower levels. It may take place at a collation center for the ward, local government area (LGA),or at state or national INEC headquarters. Wholesale rigging was made easier in Nigeria by INEC's deliberate obfuscation of the collation and tabulation process, which made it nearly impossible to trace and verify results from a polling station up the line. Wholesale rigging is very difficult to prove because there are at least six layers of counting and tabulation, because INEC avoids announcing disaggregated poll results, and because results are not posted at polling stations, wards or other counting and collation points. It is hard to tell how the results may have been changed or inflated when results are not broken down to the state, LGA, or ward level. Wholesale fraud is mostly committed by the ruling party, because they are in control of most of the state and local governments and therefore have the most access to the machinery of power (INEC, security services) to achieve desired results. However, in opposition-dominated states, wholesale rigging by the opposition is possible and probably occurred. ¶5. (C) Examples of wholesale fraud witnessed by observers include: --Withholding of vote tally sheets from polling stations around the nation. This allowed officials up the line either to disqualify the results reported from a station because they were submitted "improperly" or, more often, for the tally sheets to be fraudulently filled in at a less visible point up the chain of tabulation and submitted as genuine. --In Katsina, Mission personnel personally witnessed PDP party agents and INEC officials changing a stack of tally sheets just 500 meters from a tabulation center. -- In the Enugu East LGA, at least half of all polling station results were being counted at the LGA rather than at the polling place as required by law. Domestic observers and party agents did not witness this counting. Results which had been counted at the polling places had been brought directly to the LGA rather than being collated at the ward level. None of the polling places had official tally sheets and tallies were recorded on plain note paper and were unsigned by polling station staff or party agents. The materials were piled in heaps and signed out without even the informal tally sheets being separated and collected. Power was cut as darkness fell, making it impossible to read ballots or tally sheets anyway. The Election Officer on site refused to describe what process he would use to collect and tally results, which it appeared simply would not happen at all. --On April 15, INEC headquarters in Abuja announced gubernatorial results for Delta state before election officials in Delta had finished counting the results. On April 16, INEC headquarters announced the gubernatorial ABUJA 00000793 003.2 OF 004 results for Ondo state even though the Ondo Resident Electoral Commissioner was reportedly trying to delay the announcement because there were still no results from four of the LGAs. --In Edo state after the first round, the INEC-announced results were almost an exact reverse of the results Mission staff observed in the field. --At the national level, we surmise that wholesale rigging occurred simply through logic. Observers witnessed low turnouts (less than twenty percent nationwide) compounded by large areas of the country where voting did not take place, yet INEC's announced results show turnout of over sixty percent. This means that at least half, if not three-quarters, of the votes "counted" by INEC in the Presidential race were not based on ballots cast (Ref A). --On April 23, INEC headquarters in Abuja announced the results of the Presidential election when only 13 of the 36 states had finished collating results. --An INEC Commissioner commented privately to an American aid worker on April 25 that "even INEC was shocked at the incredibly high vote total for Yar'Adua." "Factory Direct" Rigging -------------- ¶6. (C) Mission has reported extensively on INEC's poor record of elections preparations (Ref B). Inadequate technical and logistical preparation and the lack of voter education created a climate of confusion that was exploited for fraudulent purposes. Some of this technical and logistical mismanagement was inadvertent, but some of it seems deliberate, designed to enable fraud at the wholesale and retail levels. ¶7. (C) Numerous examples of "factory direct" rigging committed by INEC and the GON can be found in post's reporting over the past year. Additional examples include: --Shuffle nationwide of police commanders and Regional Electoral Commissioners (the highest ranking election official in each state) several days before the election. --Failure to issue appropriate identification to poll workers, party agents, and observers, which created confusion so that voters did not know who was a legitimate election official and who was not. --Failure to hire and train poll workers on time, which lead to inconsistent and exploitable procedures at polling stations around the country. --Large-scale disenfranchisement of citizens through poorly trained poll workers using a badly flawed, disorganized voters' register. Disenfranchisement of voters in states where the majority of polling stations never opened or opened extremely late (including but not limited to Rivers, Delta, Bayelsa, Anambra, Abia, Gombe, Bauchi, and Borno). In several of these states, elections were not held at all in either round, with a tiny number, if any, polling stations opened, and results, usually with incredibly high turnouts, simply manufactured out of thin air. -- Printing of presidential ballots without serial numbers or a tracking system that would allow for the detection of counterfeit or non-sequential ballots. --Consistent denial of problems with elections preparation by senior INEC and GON officials when the international community offered to help with things like registration, printing ballots or technical advice. Ignoring technical advice provided by the UNDP, IFES, others. --Use of state machinery, especially the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, to keep opposition candidates off the ballot. Declaring surprise "holidays" on April 12 and 13 to deliberately delay a Supreme Court decision on whether Atiku and other opposition candidates may contest the ABUJA 00000793 004.2 OF 004 election. Result of Rigging: Garbage In, Garbage Out -------------- ¶8. (C) COMMENT: Perhaps, as President Obasanjo and the PDP contend, the deeply flawed election process doesn't matter because "Yar'Adua would have won anyway." Unfortunately, we will never know. An election is merely a process to translate the will of the people into the selection of government officials. Like any process, if the data going into the process is invalid, the result is meaningless. As computer programmers like to say, "garbage in, garbage out." In this case, the data (input) are the ballots cast by legitimate voters and the result (output) is the naming of Nigeria's president-elect. However, most Nigerian voters did not or could not cast ballots, retail level fraud meant that many voters were intimidated or had their vote "watered down" by ballot box stuffing, wholesale rigging insured that results from the polling station to the state level were "padded" with extra votes (usually but not always for the ruling party),and all this occurred in an atmosphere of chaos and confusion about even simple things like who was on the ballot and where and when to vote. It is therefore impossible to know how well Yar'Adua would have done in a legitimate election, because the results have been so manipulated from top to bottom that they no longer bear any relationship to reality. END COMMENT. CAMPBELL