Just in: Mistaken identity favoured PCP, ADC to emerge 3rd, 4th in presidential polls—BHIU
Since the announcement of the entire results of the 2019 presidential election held on Saturday February 23rd, the Business Hilights Intelligence Unit (BHIU), an independent research arm of the publication has started observing certain strange trends in the overall results.
On the ballot paper, there were 73 party logos which stand for each presidential candidate in the contest.
However, apart from the two frontline candidates from the All progressive Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) whom their high scores were explainable and understandable because the candidates; the next two parties coming distant third and forth the Peoples Coalition Party (PCP) and African Democratic Congress (ADC), are relatively unknown parties.
Whereas the winner, President Muhammadu Buhari and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the PDP really campaigned across the federation and sold their plans to majority of voters, the candidates of both the PCP and ADC were not even known by many voters, yet they emerged third and fourth getting more votes that four other known contestants in the process.
For example, the candidate of the PCP, Dr. Felix Nicholas is not known and never appeared on popular TV programmes during the campaign season, but polled 110,196 to emerge third while the candidate of the ADC, Dr. Obadiah Mailafia polled 97,874 to come fourth.
Studies and empirical analysis by BHIU showed that both candidates enjoined mistaken identity powered by voter-anxiety and sight challenges of many voters who could not differentiate between APC (which certainly was in their mind) and ADC. The same scenario favoured PCP which has same colours as in the PDP logo and staying just before the PDP logo on the presidential ballot.
According to the study, BHIU said the above analogy explained why both parties emerged third and fourth positions rather than the relatively known quartet of Dr Kingsley Muoghalu of YPP (21,886), Gov. Donald Duke of SDP (34,746), Omoyele Sowore of AAC (33,953) and Fela Durotoye of ANN (16,779) who are ordinarily supposed to follow APC’s 15,191,847 votes and PDP’s 11,262,978 votes when level of awareness so created ahead of the election is considered.
Leader of the BHIU and publisher of Business Hilights, Prince Stan Okenwa, who reviewed the report before its public presentation, called on INEC to review the logos of parties to limit issues of mistaken identities during voting.
According to him, “When we studied the Exel Spreadsheet used by INEC to announce each of the states’ results, it was discovered that parties before and after both APC and PDP had relative rise in number of votes more than others, but ADC and PCP had higher votes indicating a case of mistaken identity at the very point of thumb printing by several voters across the federation because the case was the same in all the states.”
