Nigeria: Civil Society Organizations Launch Collaborative Tool to Ensure Transparency of Election Results

This platform will display crowd-sourced form EC8A from citizen observers and compare it to results uploaded on INEC’s Irev portal.

Enough is Enough (EiE) in collaboration with The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), Dataphyte, CCHub and BudgIT has launched its citizen’s Irev portal, www.ootcresults.com, for public use. This platform will display crowd-sourced form EC8A from citizen observers and compare it to results uploaded on the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC)’s Irev portal.

The portal is a data-driven citizen-led intervention to get citizens engaged in ensuring transparency of the votes cast. This is how it works:

1) Upload your signed Polling Unit Results Sheet

2) Compare to an uploaded IReV Result Sheet

3) Flag Discrepancies

4) Document happenings at your Polling Unit – no voting, violence etc.

Recall that in the just concluded presidential election, the collation and transmission of the results proved to be INEC’s biggest challenge and failing, leading to the discontent of a huge cross-section of Nigerians with the electoral process.

Tobi Oluwatola, the Executive Director of CJID, believes that this tool will help build trust in the electoral process. He says “on February 25, citizens were deprived of the agency of monitoring their vote from polling unit to data collation because a critical element of accountability, the IREV failed. www.ootcresults.com gives them another option to upload their polling unit-level results in real time and compare them with INEC’s uploads to the IREV. We, in civil society, hope this modest intervention helps restore credibility to the electoral process.”

It is hoped that this collaborative tool will re-ignite people’s will to get involved in the process. Yemi Ademolekun, Executive Director of Enough is Enough (EiE),says “Citizens have shown that they are invested in these 2023 elections and we hope they do the work to ensure their votes count!”

“Our objective for ootcresults.com is that it actually becomes the citizens’ portal, where we can collaboratively fulfil our watchdog function,” says Joshua Olufemi, founder of Dataphyte. ” In addition to demanding openness and accountability from INEC as citizens use the platform, we will also be actively promoting that transparency”. The simple technology, it is hoped, will ensure that public complaints are recorded and compiled for use in any future interventions.

Nigerian citizens are therefore implored to go out and vote and take pictures of their Polling Unit’s EC8A form and upload them to this website.