The new Electoral Act ran its first race. Here's what the results actually show.

Here's what Nigeria's new electoral framework looks like in practice.

On Saturday, 1,680,315 people were registered to vote in the FCT area council elections — the first held under the Electoral Act Tinubu signed five days earlier. By the time counting was done, 239,210 had shown up. That's 15%. APC won five of six councils. PDP won one, in Gwagwalada.

INEC uploaded 93% of polling unit results to IReV by Sunday afternoon. The system the new Act built ran without drama.

That's not nothing. In 2022, FCT turnout was 9.4%. Twice as many people came out this time. INEC's own statement said all polling units were confirmed open by 10am. The result sheets were signed by agents from multiple parties. On the metrics the Act was designed to measure, Saturday worked.

But here's the part worth sitting with. In AMAC — the largest council, with 837,338 registered voters — Wike's candidate Christopher Maikalangu won 40,295 votes. The PDP candidate got 3,398. Before election day, the PDP's own AMAC candidate publicly stepped down in Maikalangu's favour following what he described as Wike's intervention. The national PDP called it anti-democratic. The votes were still counted. The sheets were still signed.

What happened in AMAC was legal. It was also completely legible.

This matters because Saturday wasn't just a local government election. It was a preview. The Electoral Act that just ran this race is the same one that will govern the 2027 presidential contest. The transmission framework is discretionary. The collation structure is unchanged. The political mechanics in AMAC — the candidate withdrawal, the ministerial intervention, the lopsided margin — those aren't violations of the system. They're the system.

When people protested outside the National Assembly against the Act's manual transmission clause, they weren't protesting against a hypothetical future. They were protesting against exactly this. The first election under the new rules ran on Saturday. The results are in.