Group poised to block vote rigging in Ekiti

Nigeriadecide.org, an online platform designed to prevent election rigging in the coming elections in Nigeria, and powered by the Innovative Technologies for Development Foundation (IT4D), will be fully on stream Saturday for the gubernatorial election holding in Ekiti State.

The platform has been designed to use one of the most ubiquitous things in Nigeria, mobile phones, in empowering the electorate to protect the integrity and transparency of the election process. The platform is designed to accept SMS: the electorate can send in reports of whatever situation is happening in their polling units as well as the announced election result of their own polling units after the election.

According to a statement, representatives of the Nigeriadecide.org initiative for two months went round Ekiti State, sensitizing the people about the platform and recruiting volunteer representatives locally to help spread the word about the initiative.

“Up until today Friday 20th June, the initiative has used online and offline media channels for connecting with the people of Ekiti State, addressing the different concerns and misgivings that the people had. Among these offline media channels are Ekiti TV (Ektv), Radio Nigeria Ado-Ekiti (Progress 100.5fm) and Ekiti Radio (91.5fm). The initiative also employed the online social media in spreading the reach of the initiative,”it said.

“The response of the people of Ekiti State has been largely positive as they understand the potential of the platform in checkmating irregularities in the guber polls.”

The Nigeriadecide.org platform has been designed to receive information, about happenings in different polling units around Ekiti State and Nigeria at large (for general elections), sent to it (09037346541) in form of SMS. This information will be analyzed by a language-analysis algorithm and relayed to the appropriate authorities, the Nigerian Police Force in the case of violence-related information, and the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) in the case of information about the conduct of the election.

All information received will be displayed in real time on the Nigeriadecide.org website, twitter timeline (@nigeriadecide) and facebook page (www.facebook.com/nigeriadecide2015)

Electorates can also send the results announced in their polling units to the platform for it to be made available on the Nigeriadecide.org website for everyone to know how the election goes in each polling unit. This avenue has been made available to ensure transparency in the collation of results by the Electoral monitoring Body and as a check-and-balance system for the final results announced. All the results sent to the platform by electorates have to go through a sentiment-detection algorithm to detect malicious result reports. If the results passes the test posed to it by the algorithm, the result is displayed on the website as a potentially authentic result for everyone to see.

The electorates are also enjoined to record the election proceedings in all ways possible, especially the result announcement. Nigeriadecide.org will require all the electorates who send announced results to the platform to provide corroborating evidence for the results they sent. These may be in audio, video recordings of the result announcement at the polling unit or a snapshot of the result sheet pasted at the polling station after the announcement of the result of the election at that polling unit.

Nigeriadecide.org initiative was recently nominated for a UNESCO award.

.Press Release by Nigeriadecide.org