On August 15, 2026, as Nigerians awaited the official results of the Osun State governorship election, a platform called E Don Kast was already sharing real-time polling unit results. By the
On August 15, 2026, as Nigerians awaited the official results of the Osun State governorship election, a platform called E Don Kast was already sharing real-time polling unit results. By the time the official figures were announced, users of the platform had a detailed, ward-by-ward view of the election’s progress.
Technext confirmed the platform’s effectiveness during the election. E Don Kast is an independent election data platform designed to address a major issue in Nigerian elections: discrepancies between the results recorded at polling units and those officially announced. The platform captures data at the source, ensuring that the accurate results do not change throughout the collation process.
On election day, citizens at polling units, voters, party agents, journalists, and observers can submit results directly to the platform using their phones. They enter the figures from Form EC8A, the official INEC result sheet, and are encouraged to upload a photo of the form. Following submission, the data undergo a verification process before being displayed on a live map and results table.
E Don Kast was founded by Femi Olamijulo, an urban planner and geospatial policy analyst, who aimed to make Nigeria’s election results transparent from the polling unit upwards. The platform enables voters to upload photographs of official result sheets, aggregates submissions by polling unit, and highlights discrepancies in the data.
E Don Kast’s Osun Guber Election monitoring Olamijulo, who holds dual master’s degrees from Harvard, was inspired by the real-time visibility of election results in the United States. He noticed that while Nigeria has accurate results at the polling unit, much of that clarity is lost in the collation process.
E Don Kast does not replace INEC or claim authority to declare winners; rather, it serves as a non-partisan initiative providing a citizen-held record of polling-unit results for comparison with official announcements. The platform was used in various elections, including the February FCT, Kano, and Rivers by-elections, as well as the June Ekiti governorship election, and is now active for the Osun State governorship election.
Additionally, Olamijulo’s team has created a national electoral map encompassing all 8,809 wards and 176,846 polling units, forming the basis for collecting and displaying results.
How E don Kast verifies what people submitThe platform ensures credibility through a layered verification system. When results are submitted, automated fraud checks look for duplicate submissions, suspicious patterns, and anomalies that could indicate false data. Including photo evidence boosts the submission’s confidence score.
Next, a consensus scoring process compares results from different individuals at the same polling unit to see if they match. High-confidence submissions are automatically approved and published, while those with lower scores are flagged for human or community review.
The community verification is especially notable. After a result is published, anyone can confirm its accuracy or dispute it with evidence. The more confirmations a result receives, the higher its confidence score becomes, creating a crowdsourced accountability system.
This approach is crucial because the reliability of the system depends on the data submitted by people. If one person submits false data but many others submit accurate results, the algorithm will identify the incorrect submission.
E Don Kast Why platforms like E Don Kast exist, and what Nigerian election history tells usThe need for independent verification of election results in Nigeria is clear and well-documented.
During the 2023 presidential election, the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) IReV portal, meant for real-time uploading of polling unit results, faced many problems. Organisations like YIAGA Africa and Situation Room noted that the results on this portal often did not match those recorded by party agents and observers at polling stations. INEC’s servers struggled with the number of users, causing delays in uploading results in some states, which went against the goal of providing real-time transparency.
Similar issues were noted during the 2019 presidential election. The European Union Election Observation Mission reported that managing results remained a weak point in Nigeria’s electoral process, with many discrepancies between polling unit figures and the final results. Kebbi State particularly raised concerns, as civil society groups pointed out results that didn’t match what observers had documented.
Looking back further, the 2011 elections in places like Rivers and Bayelsa produced results that were described as statistically unlikely by both international and local observers. This pattern has been noticed over several elections: the polling unit is where the votes are most visible and accurate. The integrity issues usually arise during the collation process, where the votes are counted upward.
E don Kast’s system was created to fill this gap. It provides an independent, time-stamped, and photo-evidenced record of polling unit results as they are announced, before they enter the collation process. This platform gives citizens, journalists, and candidates a reference point to compare with official results.
Similar read: Beyond tech hubs: Why Osun State needs technology as infrastructure, not an industry
For the Osun election on August 15, this reference was available in real time. As results came in from the thirty local governments in the state, E don Kast collected and organised them by ward and local government area, allowing anyone following the election to see an ongoing picture of the vote. The platform also showed confidence scores, indicating which results were strongly verified by multiple observers and which were still pending confirmation.
What this means for 2027Osun served as a trial run for next year’s general elections. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) used it to test its BVAS technology after experiencing issues during a mock exercise in August. Political parties evaluated their ability to mobilise and monitor the election, while civic tech platforms like E don Kast examined if real-time result collation could work on a large scale in Nigeria.
The results from August 15 suggest that it can work, but its effectiveness depends heavily on the number of trained observers using it. In a presidential election with 176,000 polling units across the country, covering all of them will require a much larger mobilisation effort than what was needed in Osun.
This highlights the next challenge to address. The technology behind E don kast is solid, and the verification process is reliable. The main gap isn’t technical; it’s about having more people involved- observers, journalists, party representatives, and citizens- who need to know about the platform and how to use it.
Voting exercise at a polling unit in Nigeria If more people are educated about it, the 2027 elections could be the first time in Nigeria where it becomes genuinely hard to cover up the difference between what happens at polling units and what gets reported.
Read also: INEC says BVAS runs on Android 10, raising cybersecurity questions ahead of the Osun guber election
