Election sophistication and the changing contours of vote buying in Nigeria’s 2019 general elections

Abstract

The phenomenon of vote buying at every round of elections in Nigeria since 1999 has attracted the attention of scholars. This has given rise to a plethora of insightful analyses. In these studies, vote buying was seen mostly as a pre-voting matter. However, the 2019 elections witnessed the entrenchment of a pattern of vote buying known as ‘see and buy’, in which voters display their votes before proceeding to money collection points, often discreetly located around the voting centres. This article sees the trend as a response of the political actors to the increasing sophistication of Nigeria’s electoral administration, which made old-style election malpractices such as ballot snatching, ballot stuffing and result falsification difficult. This article adopts a qualitative method that utilises data sourced from secondary sources such as reports of local and international election observers and newspapers. It concludes that vote buying is a crooked response of the political class to electoral reforms in Nigeria.