How to rig a Nigerian election
11 min readSep 29, 2018
'rig' to manipulate fraudulently.In the context of this manual, we are referring to fraudulent manipulation of democratic or supposedly democratic elections in Nigeria in order to win or for the result to be what the rigger wants not what the electorate wants.Why rig? For many reasons. The most visible reason is to win the election and enjoy the benefits and privileges conferred by the office, and these benefits are huge. Sometimes you rig to deny a candidate the office even when you will not benefit directly from the other candidate who becomes the winner. The objective here becomes to show that you are a godfather who can determine the fortunes of candidates irrespective of the wishes of the electorate. A godfather becomes a power broker and a receiver of tributes from those who expect favors. Sometimes elections are rigged unwittingly where actions and circumstances conspire to rob the electorate of the result but then this is not fraudulent and not covered by this manual.For a rigging to be considered successful , the objective must be achieved and preferably that success must be sustained. It must be sustained over the inevitable legal challengers . For it to be sustained it has to be an end to end operation that has anticipated and circumvented the typical grounds for challenge and provided the perfectly legal cover for the rig from registration to swearing in. It has to be the perfect crime. To successfully rig the election you should be prepared to perfect the act before the elections, during the elections and after the elections. Before the elections start several activities happen. Electoral laws may be reviewed, constitutions may be reviewed, electoral officials will be appointed, electoral materials need to be designed and procured, security agents need to be organized and candidates need to be chosen, campaigns need to be run, voters registers need to be updated , constituencies delineated. These activities set the stage for the elections and are the starting points for any successful election rigging. If you plan to rig the election and you do not have any influence in setting the rules of the election then you are already handicapped. As an individual this is usually quite diffi cult to pull through but easy for a political party or a political class. The election rules must be done in such a way as to make it easy for the rig to happen and most importantly for the rig to be sustained. Studying the Nigerian election laws and the constitution you immediately see the rig-friendly provisions and omissions designed to allow rigging and sustaining the rig. You will see for instance that there is no provision for punishing the beneficiary or the organizers of the rig even when a valid challenge proves conclusively that there was rigging. This is deliberate. Without this provision, when the rig is successfully challenged in court or even when it is discovered the only thing lost will be the resources put into the rig. But these resources were budgeted for and nobody is hurt.In fact since the process of proving the rig can draw out over the years, the beneficiary of the rig would have been reaping the windfall of the rig and would have recouped all the investments and some. If there is a provision that ensures that an unsuccessful rig or an unsustained rig exacts a cost much more than the benefit of the rig, then the first task of a successful rig is to get this provision removed, watered down or emasculated by whatever means. Changes at this level are managed by the party especially when the party has the majority and influence required to achieve it. Another legal provision that creates the foundation for a successful rig is the requirement that whoever emerges winner be sworn in even while there are challenges to the election. This of course is made so that there is no vacuum in government but fits in nicely to allow the rig recoup it's cost even if the rig is not sustained. It is important that these legal provisions be made with the best of intentions so that opponents and activists do not understand the implications immediately. Or consider the rules around cancelling election and having a re-run. You can see how easily this can be exploited to render any election inconclusive.With the laws designed to protect and reward the rig in place, attention turns to staffing the electoral commission and setting the rules for the actual elections. Of course you can not appoint well known crooks into the election commission. You either look for well meaning men of integrity who clearly do not have a clue as to how the system works and how it can be sabotaged or you appoint garrulous experts that will present a front of integrity while assisting you to device the rig. If you appoint competent experts who understand the various manifestations of a rig and have the courage and integrity to block it then of course your rig is well and truly sunk. It is important to understand the relative importance of each official and the impact he has on the final result. While a state resident commissioner has a lot of power, it must be used very well or it could easily be thwarted by returning officers and presiding officers. You cannot plan a rig that does not have the officials of the electoral commission at all relevant levels as accomplices. Do not even start. Having them as accomplices does not however guarantee success nor sustainability, after all they will not lose their jobs if you succeed and certainly not if you lose. Be careful however because you do not have any guarantee that these officials are not working with your opponents in another rig. Clearly your rig should not be one dimensional but should have backups and fall backs. A major benefit of working with the top echelon of the electoral commission is that this is where the details of the electoral process is defined. If you plan to rig, it will be in your utmost interest to participate actively in defining the process. The electoral process hides procedures that appear on the surface to be designed to ensure that rigging does not work but in actual fact encourages the smart rigger. For instance by demanding that results be written on a specific form that will be signed by specific officials, we plan to ensure that results cannot be faked. Of course the smart rigger understands that in order to rig using this rule, all you need is to get the electoral officials to distribute fake result forms and handover the genuine ones to you to fill out and sign. It is easy to reject the fake forms when we have more than one result form being returned. In fact, the officer returning the fake forms will be arrested for forgery. It is therefore important to ensure that the general public and your opponents have no idea how to conclusively identify a fake electoral form or ballot from the original one. You need to be involved in the specification, design and production of these forms. That way you can provide fake originals which only your accomplices know how to detect. Of course if the elections are going to be electronic then you must have influence with the manufacturers of the voting equipment or the engineers that set it up. Between these two, it will be possible to program the machines to give you an unfair advantage. Elections are for voters to cast their votes. So the winner must have more votes than his opponent and the loser must have fewer votes. Also you cannot have more votes than there are registered voters neither can you have unregistered voters voting. Clearly therefore you must as part of the rig manipulate the voters register. One way is to pad the register with names of fictitious voters who you collect their voters cards and then find a way to get them into the box either during or after the elections. Of course you can just make sure that all your supporters are registered while your opponents or likely opponents find it difficult to find their names in the register. To carry this out successfully you must go through a charade of registering voters, taking protests and sharing various versions of the final voters register. However make sure only you and the electoral commission know the voters register that will actually be used during voting. When the others find out during the election it self, it is too late for them to do anything but protest. You can then use a doctrine of necessity to get people without valid registration to vote and annul their votes at your convenience. If you have done most of these, then you ready for the election: the election rules are in your favor, the officials are collaborating and the voters register belongs to you. During the election it self, voters come out and vote and the votes are counted. Most rigs manifest here. The pre-election preparations enable you to have relatively smooth sailing rig during the election itself. If you had secured support of the top electoral election officials, you will have been involved in defining the electoral processes as well as election materials you are in a position to execute a variety of rigs. Let us look at a few.
1. The result switch
This rig comes in a variety of ways. The manifestation is to switch the result documentation to favor you irrespective of the actual voting. The electoral results as per current procedures are filled out in various forms and endorsed by electoral officials and party agents. The first step in this rig is to get your collaborative in the electoral commission to distribute fake result forms to the lower level electoral officials. An added bonus will be to get the lower level officials to pre-sign the authentic forms. This is not that difficult be cause you can get them to sign the original documents during a training session. Now that you have pre-endorsed forms , the election can go on. During collation of results, your collaborators in the electoral commission can then switch the forms or you can precipitate some fracas and in the confusion bring forward your own forms into the mix. Now when every body calms down you declare that there are fake results being presented and ask the electoral officials to validate the forms. Easily enough, they will identify the real results as being on fake forms. The rig is done. Of course this rig can still be challenged and a recount will throw it out. So it is important that as the result is being switched that you have made arrangements to stuff the ballot boxes with enough voters cards to ensure that recounts favor you. 2.The phantom voters
For this rig, the objective is to ensure that your opponents supporters do not vote or that their votes do not count. The easiest rig of this type is to ensure that the voters in your opponents stronghold do not see their names in the voters register. This is best achieved by getting involved in the voters registration exercise from beginning. In collaboration with equipment manufacturers or electoral officials ensure that a voters register exists which reflects the voters you want to vote. This voters register need not be the same as what was published or what was shared with the political parties preferably publish the voters registrar electronically. In electronic form, you can always claim later that what opponents claim was published was their own fabrication. During the election itself, the real register is now used. It is too late for anyone to complain. Be magnanimous to allow those not registered to vote but their votes or the votes in that voting centre will be later cancelled for being more than registered voters or for allowing voters who are not in the register to vote. 3. The phantom electionIn this rig, the object is to ensure that elections do not hold where you don't want it to hold and still generate result. It is interesting to know that result forms are valid even if party agents refuse to sign! There are several ways to perpetrate this rig. One of the most sophisticated is to announce that the result has been postponed and then delay the arrival of voting materials and officials till people actually believe the elections will no longer hold. Or simply to delay the supply of voting materials till a few hours before closing of votes. Your opponents will spend their time protesting the injustice but they will not be able to prove in court that voting did not hold. Voting starting late is not a valid reason to cancel entire elections. This rig typically gets combined with a phantom result rig.4. The electorate be damned rig This is the simplest of rigs but the easiest to challenge and the one most likely to create chaos. However experience has shown that if combined properly with the after election rigs, it can be successful or at least sustained till the costs of the rig has been recouped many times over. To achieve this, you collaborate with the electoral official who is mandated to declare the result and he/she will declare the pre-agreed result and let the electorate be damned. By the rules, the result declared by this official can be only be upturned by a law court and not even his superiors in the electoral commission if any can do anything about it. Now of course there is a variety of rigs that can happen during the election day outside of these ones described here. You could abduct the voting officials, impersonate voting officials, snatch voting materials, substitute voting materials or just scare voters away with superior firepower. Most importantly you have to remember that journalists and activists and just plain meddlesome observers will be looking for evidence of rigging. It is either you employ the subtle rigging which confuses everybody or you employ the more blatant electorate be damned variety. The former has a better chance of being sustained while the later will breed chaos and will likely be upturned. After the elections
The elections have been held, results declared but the rig is not over. This is the time to manipulate the judiciary in order to hold onto a rig or to actually perpetrate the rig. In order to hold onto a rig, you need to manipulate the evidence and also compromise the judges. Typically the judges will require proof that the votes counted substantially support the results or that the election itself substantially met the requirements of the electoral law and the constitution. On one part, your preparation for the rig should have taken care of the electoral law and the constitution. On the other part, the evidence surviving from the election should support your rig. The manage the evidence, you should immediately after the election work with the electoral commission to adjust the votes in the ballot box and the election result forms in the custody of the electoral commission to substantially support the declared results. This adjustment will involve generating new election forms if necessary, adding and removing ballots from the ballot boxes or making the ballot boxes disappear. You cannot do anything about videos of the rig or audio recordings of the rig happening obtained clandestinely by journalists, activists or your opponents. These can be challenged for authenticity by your lawyers. Remember that the electoral law does not set rigid parameters for the acceptability of the election and the election results. It is therefore up to the judges to make up their own rules about what is acceptable beyond the obvious. Judges are known to have followed the defined electoral processes and laws rigidly. Some others have taken quite a liberty. No matter how good your lawyers are, if you must sustain the rig, you must reach the judges through their sons, daughters, girlfriends, wives, relatives or cult colleagues. You must offer cannot-refuse inducements of money, property, power or privilege or of course have a reputation for mindless and fearless violence to be visited on sons, daughters, wives, girlfriends to the fourth generation if the judge refuses to bend. Of course you may still not sustain the rig but at least prolong it and it's enjoyment to build a new brand or to recover your investments. As an aspiring politician and activist, you must be clearly adept even beyond the suggestions in this manual in order to perpetrate or defeat the rig. Rigging is part of every electoral contest. After all it is said that all is fair in war. Politics is war by other means..
