Simply download and install the app from the Google play store or Apple store. The download links are on our web page: https://electionwatch-ng.com. When you open the app, it will show details of the next election that we are monitoring. On the election day, wait until the returning officer of your polling booth has counted and tallied all the total votes. Enter these votes on your app and sent it to us. You also have the option of taking a photo of the returning officer's figures so as to verify the authenticity of the figures you are sending.

Yes, users will be anonymous. No registration is required and we will not collect or save any information that can identify the poster. The only thing the app will take is a temporary unique Id of every phone, when it posts a set of results. This will prevent the same phone from being used to post more than one set of results.

We will have several levels of authentication in order to ensure that our final figures are highly accurate. The first set of results will be immediate. The figures posted by the users will be updated on our site and visible to the public in real time. But we will tell users that those figures haven't been authenticated to filter out fraud or errors. They will simply give the user an idea of the direction of the voting.

The second set of figures will be machine authenticated. We will use some algorithms to try to detect where fraud may have occurred. For instance if there are 20 submissions from one polling station, and they all match, then it's unlikely that there was fraud or error with these figures.

Another check the machine will do is the location check. The location of the phone will be sent, with every set of figures. If the phone location is not within a few meters of the polling booth, then it the result will be marked as suspect.

A third level of checks will be with the public, themselves. Everyone will be able to check the results of their polling booths on our website: https://electionwatch-ng.com. If they disagree with the results that we have posted on our site, they can click a button on it to indicate so. We will mark that those results for further checks.

The final checks will be manual checks by our staff and volunteers. Wherever there are still uncertain results, after the figures have gone through all the above checks, they will manually check the results against the images of the returning officers final tally.

By the time we go through all these stages of checks we can be pretty confident of the accuracy of our results. And the user will see these results in real time.

No, they do not necessarily provide accuracy but they flag discrepancies with the INEC results if those results don't match what the two people posted. Then, this inconsistencies can be investigated properly.

If two different people, who don't know each other from Adam, wait until the votes are counted and the "statement of result sheet is filled out, write out these total on the app, take a photo of the statement of result and send to to our server, it would be very difficult for them to fake this - especially when we track their time and location as at the time they send those results to us. It will be almost impossible for these two separate people to fake the same result and to do so while standing in front of the polling booth!

Now, is it possible that they can cheat with the app. Yes. Is it likely? No. If the results on our app don't match INEC's published result, does it mean that INECs results are wrong and ours are correct? No.. however, it gives us a very good basis for further investigation.

In summary: The first step of the app is to flag discrepancies... then it will be up to us to prove which of the two different results is the correct one..

1) The app doesn't need everyone. Just 2 or 3 people per polling unit is all that's required.

2) Not every polling unit is required... even if we can prevent rigging in a few local governments, in a few states that would be great. Really, we need to concentrate only in the contentious areas; the areas where we know that there is likely to be rigging. Like Rivers state.

3) We have to start from somewhere. We have to do something rather than fold our arms. If we can prove ourselves in one just local government election, people will begin to take the app seriously.

4) How can we be sure of accuracy? Well, there is no 100% foolproof but there are several things we have put in place for instance: we ask people to take a photo of the final statement of result. That would be almost impossible to fake; Every post to out server captures the phone location and time, so if the post does not come from the vicinity of the polling unit it will be flagged as likely a scam; There are a number of other checks - both human and machine - that we will be running - to ensure the accuracy of our results.

5) There will be a learning curve. This has never been done anywhere, as far as we know. There will be mistakes made when we start but we hope to use them to fine tune our operations before the main election in 2027.

Although this app is originally built for the Nigerian election, we are happy to adapt it for use to any other elections that may find it useful.