Yiaga Africa to Use AI for Osun Governorship Election Results Check

Election observer group Yiaga Africa will use an AI-assisted system along with its observation methods to check results from the Osun State governorship election on Saturday. This will help spot any differences between votes at polling units and results on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) results portal.

Samson Itodo, the Executive Director, shared this news in Osogbo on Friday, before the election.

Mr Itodo explained that Yiaga will use its Process and Results Verification for Transparency (PRVT) method along with its Election Result Analysis Dashboard (ERAD 2.0). This will evaluate both the election process and the reliability of the results.

The PRVT is a method based on statistics, allowing Yiaga Africa to assess what happens on election day. It checks if official results match the votes recorded at selected polling units.

The organisation says this method aims to provide an independent, data-based review of election results.

ERAD is a platform that combines AI and human checks. Yiaga uses it to audit results published on INEC’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV).

Yiaga has used this system before, especially during the 2022 Ekiti and Osun governorship elections.

Mr Itodo warned that just seeing results on IReV does not mean those results are real.

He pointed out that many steps in the electronic results process are not clear to the public. This includes validation steps that happen between polling units and the final results.

He said this shows the need for a way to independently verify results, comparing what was recorded with what appears on the results portal.

Mr Itodo noted that once results leave polling units, there are validation steps that the public cannot see.

He raised an important question about what happens if the results uploaded to IReV are changed or faked.

“That is why we say that in this entire journey, these are not visible, and INEC is to make it visible. But that’s where the PRVT meeting comes in because it helps check some of the results that are here,” he said.

Yiaga believes that electronic publication does not automatically confirm the honesty of an election. The results uploaded by INEC need to be tested against what observers saw and recorded.

This difference is crucial because Yiaga’s method does not just repeat INEC’s numbers. Its PRVT system uses a sample of polling units to create independent estimates to compare with official results.

The organisation mentioned its experience from the 2026 Ekiti governorship election, especially the way results were uploaded to INEC’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV). This will guide what they monitor during the Osun election.

Mr Itodo also stressed that the trustworthiness of results connects directly to the quality of the election process.

“Let me also say that for us, when you have a compromised process, it cannot produce a credible outcome,” he said.

“If the process is severely compromised, then we won’t be able to speak to the integrity.”

This means Yiaga’s evaluation of Saturday’s election will go beyond just the figures declared by INEC. The group will also look at how the election was carried out, including the delivery of materials, voting, counting, and the sharing of results.

This fits with its Watching The Vote (WTV) programme, which checks polling opening, voting, and result collation, while using PRVT to verify official results.

Mr Itodo mentioned that the organisation has held back public validation of results when they lacked confidence in the process.

“In fact, let’s say in one of the elections, actually in the 2023 elections, we didn’t make this public because we were not confident with the results, and we’ve done this in previous times,” he said.

He made it clear that Yiaga Africa would not automatically support the outcome of the Osun election just because INEC declares a winner.

Instead, the group will look at their own evidence to see if the official results are in line with their independent observation data.

Mr Itodo also pointed to the recent Ekiti governorship election as an example of the results pattern Yiaga Africa will watch for in Osun.

“For Ekiti, this was how the results trickled. The first results came at 4:10 p.m. The next result came at 4:14 p.m. There were over 283 results that hit the portal at once,” he said.

He also noted a time between 6:32 p.m. and 6:37 p.m. when many results showed up on the portal quickly.

According to him, these patterns matter to Yiaga since unusual spikes or sudden batches of results can affect how they analyze the flow of results.

Mr Itodo pointed out that Ekiti did not face the same logistical issues Yiaga Africa sees ahead of Osun.

“Now this is Ekiti where there were no issues, but Osun is completely different, and we can see it with some of the logistical issues,” he said.

Yiaga Africa had earlier raised concerns over the late movement of important election materials before Saturday's poll. They warned that logistical problems could create avoidable risks for the election.

The group’s ability to do this analysis will depend on how many results are uploaded and if they can match those results with what their observers collected independently.

The Osun governorship election is set for Saturday, 15 August. It is a major political event, seen as a three-way contest. The key players are the current Governor Ademola Adeleke of the Accord party, Bola Oyebamiji from the All Progressives Congress (APC), and Najeem Salam from the African Democratic Congress (ADC).

This election is off-cycle because Osun is one of the states where governorship elections happen separately from Nigeria’s regular general elections.

INEC has marked Osun and seven other states as off-cycle governorship states. This is due to earlier court decisions that changed the length of the governors’ tenures.