How not to rig an election is a project designed to create an early warning system for identifying, interrogating and arresting election malpractice before they happen, especially in this election cycle.

It is a forensic look at the 2007 elections, to enable us look forward towards the 2011 election.

Elections in Nigeria have for the last six or so decades followed a fairly predictable path of 'rigging'. Even so, the 2007 elections by most accounts were the worst elections in living memory

This Project, inspired by Tunji Lardner from Wangonet, gathered a team of 120 people in Lagos on 2 March 2011 to examine 'the who,' 'the what,' 'the when,' 'the how,' and 'the why,' of the 2007 elections and to build a 'Nigerian Electoral System V 2.0 Blueprint':


“The inception of the idea was about two years ago when at yet another conference on Nigeria, the issue of rigging the 2011 elections was again raised.

The predictable low calorie thinking ensued; prosaic nostrums about complex and systemic phenomena.

I raised the issue about taking a serious look back at the 2007 elections to critically examine the hidden pathologies, identify hidden patterns and yes, point out the culprits in the commission of this crime.

Then it struck me that this was actually not unlike the post-mortem investigation of a crime scene in which the victim was the elections.

So the pitch was to think of the idea as an engaging episode of any of the CSI franchise, in which the victim was the 2007 elections and the crime scene was Nigeria. We had to go back, poke around the crime scene looking for latent clues, interview ‘persons of interest,’ examine the corpse of the victim and then go to the crime laboratory to conduct the post mortem investigations before a live audience. It was clear in my mind that the only way we could get people to look at old things differently, was to present them with a newer lens to view old, familiar but really unexamined phenomena.

Through the GP process, we swapped the low-resolution monochromatic lens for a stunning HD lens, and voila, the visual tableau of the seventy-foot wall revealed the patterns, the clues, the system and the modus operandi of ‘How to rig an election’.

Even with the change of title at the behest of our sponsor, to ‘how NOT to rig an election,’ the workshop presented a critical look back at the 2007 elections, that enabled participants to look forward and clearly toward the 2011 elections and beyond.“