An image circulating online claims to show the collated election results for the 18 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Edo State, allegedly published on Premium Times’ website. Social media bloggers, including Goldmynetv have shared the image on their Instagram handles.
The image depicts the total number of votes recorded by the APC and PDP across the 18 LGAs of Edo state, on the website of Premium Times, one of the leading and credible online news outlets in Nigeria.
This comes following the conclusion of the voting exercise in the September 21 governorship election in Edo State.
Claim: Premium Times website shows collated election results for all 18 LGAs in Edo State.
Verification
The CDD War Room understands that the collation of election results is still ongoing at the time of filing this report. Although INEC’s results viewing portal, IReV, shows that over ninety percent of the Polling Unit results have been captured and uploaded to the portal, the election umpire has yet to declare results from the local government areas.
To verify the authenticity of the viral results, we checked Premium Times’ website and found no evidence of the published results. Furthermore, a Premium Times reporter, Qosim Suleiman, confirmed to us that the viral results are fake.
The news outlet has also issued a disclaimer debunking the viral claim as can be seen here.
Verdict: FALSE
The CDD War Room confirms that the circulating image allegedly showing Premium Times’ publication of Edo election results for the 18 LGAs of the State, is false. The newspaper has debunked the viral claim.