Hours to the governorship and House of Assembly elections, Collate, an alternate election result portal, has signed up over 5000 volunteers ready to start uploading on the platform.
Built by Oo Nwoye one of the notable voices in thw tech ecosystem in Africa and Cos Omosigho, Collate Africa is a crowdsourcing designed to enable Nigerian voters upload results from their polling units directly to the portal
It requires users registering with their polling units and on election day upload their polling unit results. The goal is to ensure the true results from the PUs are available to the public.
Nwoye told BusinessDay that Collate because of the failures of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to make the elections as transparent as possible and ensure the right results where uploaded on time and announced. The commission, hastily, announced a winner when the results of most of the polling units were yet to be uploaded.
Nwoye says INEC’s poor performance on 25 February was because Nigerians trusted the commission and they under-delivered.
“I strongly believed they were deficient in a very core aspect, we needed to know before the election that we had a spread of people at each Polling Unit. If it is only after elections are over, you find you do not have the coverage of all PUs, it would be too late to do anything about it,” Nwoye said.
Collate Africa is not the only innovation that has emerged following the flop of INEC. Mark Essien built forensic.nigeria2.com and Enough is Enough (EiE) and other partners built electionwatchng.com, while VIISAUS in collaboration with other companies built ARVO.
The difference these platforms have with Collate Africa is their dependence on the IReV. Collate Africa however sources its results from Nigerians participating in the elections happening across the country.
