By Modupe Gbadeyanka
To prevent the controversies that marred the presidential election held on Saturday, February 25, 2023, two tech experts, Oo Nwoye and Ozo Omosigho, have designed a live-result viewing platform for the governorship and state houses of assembly elections taking place on Saturday, March 18, 2023.
The platform known as Collate is an open and crowdsourced online result collation and viewing platform (ReV) built to aid transparency in the exercise.
It was disclosed that Collate aims to have robust, documented and centralized data of all polling unit results in all states in real-time.
To achieve this, at least one electorate from all 176,846 polling units across the federation is required to pre-register on the platform before Saturday and upload election results at their polling unit in real-time, serving as a source of reference for evidence against result tampering.
“While party agents contested election results during INEC result announcements, nobody really had real-time evidence to present. There was nowhere visible that the results were all aggregated. So it became difficult to prove,” Mr Nwoye said.
“Though a lot of people have introduced structured solutions like forms to crowdsource results, these solutions are not entirely designed to capture all the polling units and offer real-time results as they are dependent on voters sporadically finding out about those forms on election day, which may be too late.
“So, from my product knowledge, I thought it would be good to know in advance about polling units without coverage and plan for coverage.
“With voters pre-registering and indicating their polling units, we can identify the PUs that risk not having results posted on Collate and push to get voters from those PUs to register on the site before the gubernatorial election. What’s key in this product is the ability to plan ahead,” he added.
The tech executives behind this initiative have been working hard to develop the platform, which they anticipate will be a necessary game-changer for the coming elections. They are dedicated to maintaining a nonpartisan approach and prioritize the elimination of corruption and fraud in the electoral process.
“The difference with what we’re doing is that we allow voters to independently collect results and have proof,” Omosigho said. “When you can point to proof, then you can stop any malpractice in the voter process. Now any candidate from any political party will have access to clear evidence of images taken at the polling units, completely independent of INEC.”
To safeguard the integrity of the election, Collate ensures that voters who submit results to their platform will be protected, and no personally identifiable information will be disclosed to the public.
