A SENIOR Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Olisa Agbakoba, has said media organisations can project election winners only by relying on results uploaded to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
News Point Nigeria reports that Agbakoba also stressed that such projections must be properly sourced and attributed to the information on which they are based.
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Agbakoba spoke on Wednesday during an appearance on Arise Television, where he discussed INEC’s cautionary note to media organisations regarding the publication of election results.
On October 6, INEC Chairman, Joash Amupitan, cautioned media platforms against independently announcing election results, saying the Electoral Act stipulates guidelines for announcing results during the collation process.
“Resist the declaration of privately collated results because under the Electoral Act, the authority to declare result rests exclusively with the commission,” Amupitan said.
He also urged newsrooms to establish fact-checking desks, use digital forensic tools and verify election-related information with INEC before publication.
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During the discussion, Agbakoba said that although the press was free to publish election results, its projections must be based on figures emerging from the electoral process rather than independently generated results.
“You cannot say, ‘I’m projecting Agbakoba as a winner’ without attributing. There must be attribution,” he said.
Agbakoba cited international best practices, noting that global media organisations such as CNN often project election winners based on publicly available election results.
“If you watch international media… when CNN projected Obama, CNN went to the (magic) board. ‘We project Obama as the winner based on the outcomes,’” he said.
“The key here is that you can’t go on a frolic of your own and say here are the results,” Agbakoba added.
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He maintained that election projections must rely on figures obtained through the electoral process, pointing to INEC’s prescribed chain of result documentation.
“The results must be figures obtained from the process and INEC has a source of information flowing from EC8A up to EC8E. That’s what it says.”
