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A recent Master’s thesis now circulating widely argues that Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election can be forensically decoded using statistical and machine-learning techniques—and that doing so reveals significant electoral manipulation, particularly in the South-East. Given the weight of that claim and the attention it has attracted, I sought to verify its provenance. A brief check with Amara Nwankpa, who is referenced in the summary, confirmed that the thesis is genuine. He kindly shared the full document, titled Applying Machine Learning Techniques to Detect Electoral Fraud in Nigeria’s 2023 Elections by Joachim Oye MacEbong. What follows is an assessment of what the…