Nigeria’s presidential election, which was due to be held on Saturday, has been postponed to 23 February, the chairman of the country’s electoral commission said just hours before the vote was due to take place.

The Independent National Electoral Commission chairman Mahmood Yakubu, said proceeding as previously scheduled was not feasible.

He said the delay was needed to hold a free and fair election.

“The commission came to the conclusion that proceeding with the election as scheduled is no longer feasible. Consequently the commissioners decided to reschedule the presidential and national assembly elections to Saturday 23 February 2019,” he said.

President Muhammadu Buhari faces a tight election contest in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, top oil producer and most populous nation against the main opposition candidate, businessman and former vice president Atiku Abubakar.

The election has been seen as a referendum on Buhari’s first term, which has been marred by his prolonged absence due to illness, a weak economy, and the government’s failure to effectively tackle corruption and insecurity.

The country’s presidential elections in 2011 and 2015 were also delayed over logistics and security issues.

Prior to the announcement there were statements commenting on concerns over the election.

An electoral commission official said that “some result sheets and some ballot papers are reportedly missing. We want to track every (piece of) sensitive material, take inventory of what we have and what is missing”.

And a government official said, “The legitimacy of the entire process will be questioned and the winner could lack the moral authority to superintend the affairs of the state.”

One Western diplomat said: “Sensitive materials (ballot papers and results sheets) have been delayed in being distributed.”

Nigeria is also dealing with pockets of instability. Throughout the day, authorities bolstered security in much of the country on the eve of the vote in Africa’s largest democracy where past elections have been marred by violence, voter intimidation and ballot rigging.

A faction of Boko Haram attacked a state governor’s convoy on Tuesday, killing four people and stealing vehicles. Elsewhere, 15 people were crushed to death at a ruling party rally in eastern Port Harcourt. On Thursday, 14 sacks of ballot papers were intercepted in Kano state – though police said they were merely “specimen” papers to educate voters.

As Nigerians prepared to cast their votes, data analysts raised concerns about the number of new voters registered since January 2018, which they said increased by almost exactly the same percentage in each of the country’s states, and suggested that the results of Saturday’s presidential election could be open to mass rigging.

Plotted on a scatter line graph, there was a 0.99 correlation across all the states, without a single outlier. According to three separate data analysts, the parity cannot be a coincidence, and two of them called it a “statistical impossibility”.

“Only God works that closely,” one said.

But other observers said there were other possible explanations for the correlation, including demographics.

“In itself, it’s not an indicator of any kind of electoral malpractice or manipulation,” said economist Nonso Obikili. He said the correlation in the registration figures across states was “what you would expect, because demographic changes don’t happen very quickly”.

If some of the new voters registered are fake, it could imply meddling at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) , though it is unclear whether it would be the ruling party or the opposition that would stand to benefit.

Additional data seen by the Guardian shows irregularities in registration for the 2015 election in which Buhari came to power, until now considered to have been free and fair.

Source: Reuters and the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/16/nigeria-postpones-election-just-hours-before-polls-due-to-open