Methodology

Nigeria Election Monitor is an independent, unofficial, read-only monitor of Nigerian election results. It watches INEC's public IReV portal, records result uploads polling unit by polling unit, and presents them on a live dashboard with drill-downs, maps and trends.

The pipeline is deliberately simple: a small collector polls IReV at a gentle pace, stores timestamped uploads in a Postgres database, and the dashboard reads straight from that database. No batch files, no stale snapshots.

• Result uploads: INEC's public IReV portal — the same documents any citizen can view. The monitor never touches INEC's systems beyond what is published publicly.
• Timetable dates: INEC's published election timetable. The 2027 General Elections dates currently shown (Presidential/National Assembly 16 Jan 2027, Governorship/State Houses of Assembly 6 Feb 2027) follow the revision of 27 Feb 2026 and are updated whenever INEC revises the timetable.
• Archived results: concluded elections kept for the historical record. Archive data is shown as archived IReV results — it has not been independently verified against an official final declaration.
• Candidate photos: added manually from public sources with attribution — never scraped from INEC. Where no photo is available, initials are shown instead.
• Boundaries: LGA boundary shapes come from the GADM dataset, simplified for the web.

Every polling-unit upload carries a status, shown consistently across the dashboard, maps and drill-downs:

Uploaded

A result document exists for the polling unit on IReV.

Readable

The document could be opened and read.

Extracted

Vote figures were pulled from the document into the database.

Human-verified

A person checked the extracted figures against the document. The gold standard.

Disputed

Something does not add up — flagged for review, excluded from confident totals.

Not uploaded

No result document on IReV for this polling unit yet.

The badges on each race — Winner, Leading, Too close to call — are computed from the margin between the top two candidates and how much of the expected vote has been extracted:

• Winner: shown only for concluded elections.
• Too close to call: when the margin is under 2 points or less than 5% of the expected vote is in.
• Leading: otherwise — one candidate is ahead on the votes extracted so far.
• Awaiting results: no votes extracted yet.

These are monitoring conveniences, not declarations. Only INEC declares winners.

• Not an official declaration or collation system.
• Figures are as published on IReV; extraction is automated and can misread a document — check the verification status and the scanned sheet itself before treating a figure as certain.
• Coverage depends on what INEC publishes and when; a quiet dashboard may mean no uploads, not no activity.
• Archived results are historical records, not certified final results.

Unofficial — monitoring only. INEC alone declares election results.