Cameroon's Election - Tampering with Numbers Is Risky Business

This piece offers an individual perspective and examination of information from Cameroon's presidential election, authored by Guillaume ...

This piece offers an individual perspective and examination of information from Cameroon's presidential election, authored by Guillaume Tanga, a data and finance expert based in Cameroon.

While nations discuss artificial intelligence, politicians in my native country, Cameroon, continue to rely on basic mathematics.27 October 2025, the Constitutional Councilreleased the official outcomes of the presidential election that took place two weeks prior. The trend is recognizable: delayed announcements, minimal openness, and a result that sparks more inquiries than it resolves.

The Council's tally declares Paul Biya the winner and credits Issa Tchiroma Bakary (ITB)approximately 35%. ITB claims he has won. Instead of engaging in disputes, I went to the tables, examining the division-by-division (department) data from the Council's own documents, and posed a straightforward question:Do these figures make sense?

Two Nations on a Single Ballot

Show the participation rate by division and two different scenarios emerge:

• In a unified Cameroon, voter participation is approximately 50 to 60 percent. This appears to be typical electoral activity.
• In the other instance, voter participation surges to 80, 90, and occasionally 97 percent. It seems as though no one left, no one traveled, no one chose not to vote, and death took a break.

The the participation rate is directly obtained from the official division-level results of the Constitutional Council(27th October 2025). Each dot signifies a single division, anddot size indicates the number of voters in that division.

Divisions are grouped by Which candidate scored higher between Paul Biya and Issa Tchiroma Bakary (ITB): "Biya leads"means Biya obtained more votes than ITB;"Tchiroma ahead"means ITB received a higher number of votes than Biya. The dashed line indicates thenational participation rate (58%), as reported. Additional candidates also garnered votes; this visualization focuses on therelative Biya-vs-ITB pattern, not the entire candidate field.

With increased involvement, Paul Biya's advantages also increase.Where participation is normal, ITB is competitive or superior.

In cases of high participation, Biya erases those achievements.Correlation does not constitute evidence, yet such patterns warrant careful examination.

Where Is the National Lead Derived From?

The official vote margin gives Biya a lead of nearly 800,000 votes. According to the data, approximately 700,000 of this lead is found in a small group of regions where voter turnout is around 89 percent on average. The most surprising instance is Mezam in the North West, where, even though it is an area affected by conflict and has a history of opposition to Biya, there was unusually high turnout and a clear victory for him.

This chart includes only districts where the vote difference between Paul Biya and Issa Tchiroma Bakary (ITB) was more than 30,000 votes (total of 21). The vote difference is determined by subtracting the number of votes received by ITB from the number of votes received by Biya in each district. The vertical axis organizes these districts based on the absolute value of this vote difference. The ranking is indicated with a sign: districts where Biya is ahead are positioned below the horizontal line, whereas those where ITB leads are located above it. The horizontal axis represents the voter turnout as provided directly by the Constitutional Council (27 October 2025). The size of each dot corresponds to the total number of voters in each district. The dashed vertical line marks the national voter turnout rate (58%). District names are labeled with region abbreviations and the rounded vote difference.

A Trial by Numbers

To assess how reliant the national outcome is on areas with extremely high voter participation, I recalculated the scorecard by removing constituencies that exceeded various turnout thresholds. This serves as a sensitivity analysis.

In simple terms, this illustrates the outcome that would occur if only votes with a turnout lower than this limit are considered.

Participation Rate Acceptance Threshold

Biya %

Tchiroma %DifferenceDivisions kept

90%47.040.86.347

80%42.744.2-1.544

70%39.946.4-6.539

60%37.447.8-10.429

This study explores how the national outcome varies when considering different divisions.exceptionally high participation ratesare excluded. For reference, the official results file states: Biya received 53.7 percent, ITB 35.2 percent, a difference of 18.65 points. Voter participation figures are directly sourced from the Constitutional Council's official release (27 October 2025). For each threshold (90%, 80%, 70%, 60%), divisions with participation exceeding that level were excluded, and the vote counts for Paul Biya and Issa Tchiroma Bakary were recalculated based solely on the remaining divisions. No outside data, assumptions, or forecasts were used—only the exclusion of divisions with exceptionally high turnout.

The sections excluded at the highest limits arestatistical outliers: they report voter participation rates (sometimes exceeding 90%) that do not align with thenational distribution, nor common patterns in electoral democracies, nor the known circumstances on the ground (war-torn areas, migration, civil disturbances, and verified obstacles to voting). These exceptionally high participation levels are generally acknowledged in election monitoring literature ashigh-risk signs of result falsification or ballot tampering.

Therefore, this sensitivity test does not claim fraud; it indicates that the official national margin is excessively reliant on aminor grouping of units with participation rates that are statistically and operationally unlikely. Upon eliminating these exceptional divisions, the declared victor changes.

If you exclude the ultra-high voter turnout districts where participation exceeds 90 percent, the difference between the two candidates is just 7 points.Under 80 percent, Biya no longer holds a majority, and ITB is leading. At 70 percent, ITB secures an absolute majority.

According to this analysis, Biya was unable to secure victory in this election., yet he could govern his people for another 7 years, ruining the nation's future as the world merely observes.

Data source: compilation of division-level outcomes from the Constitutional Council's release on 27 October 2025. Accessible via the internet:https://droit-et-politique-en-afrique.info/conseil-constitutionnel-decision-du-27-octobre-2025-de-proclamation-des-resultats-de-lelection-presidentielle-du-12-octobre-2025?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Guillaume Brice Tanga Nkoula is a specialist in data and finance, now residing in the UK, with expertise in quantitative analysis and a focus on public policy in Central Africa.

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