Months after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) placed a ₦1.5 billion price tag on requests for Nigeria’s complete polling unit register under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, two Nigerian technology enthusiasts have built a platform that provides the same information free of charge.
The platform, CredibleVoteNG, offers structured digital access to all 176,846 polling units across Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, covering the country’s 774 local government areas and 8,809 electoral wards.
The initiative emerged against the backdrop of a public controversy that followed INEC’s October 2025 response to an FOI request by a Nigerian law firm seeking the commission’s polling unit database. In its reply, the electoral body estimated that providing the information would cost ₦1,505,901,750, citing the need to print more than six million pages at ₦250 per page.
The response triggered widespread criticism from lawyers, civil society organisations and transparency advocates, who argued that electoral information critical to democratic participation should be readily accessible to citizens.
While the debate continued, software developer Kelly Omobude and product owner Uzoanya Grant quietly worked on what would become CredibleVoteNG, a free and open-source platform designed to make electoral data available to everyone.
Accessible online through a public Application Programming Interface (API), the platform requires no registration, subscription or API key. Developers, journalists, election observers, political parties and ordinary citizens can access the data without charge.
According to the founders, the project was inspired by the belief that credible elections depend on unrestricted access to reliable information.
“Independent observation requires independent data. If every organisation is working from the same verified, open baseline — that is the foundation for credible accountability. That is what we are trying to provide,” they said.
The platform enables users to navigate Nigeria’s electoral structure from the national level down to states, local government areas, wards and individual polling units through nine dedicated API endpoints. Information is delivered in a structured format within seconds, making it useful for both technical and non-technical users.
To broaden accessibility, the developers incorporated a Swagger-based interface that allows users with no coding experience to search and explore electoral data through a standard web browser.
Omobude, who designed the platform’s technical architecture, database infrastructure and cloud-hosting environment, said the project has been developed and maintained using personal resources since March 2023.
Grant, who led product design and user experience development, described the initiative as a civic intervention intended to bridge longstanding information gaps within Nigeria’s electoral ecosystem.
For election observers and civil society organisations, access to comprehensive polling unit data has often posed significant operational challenges. Many monitoring groups spend weeks assembling information from multiple sources before deploying field personnel.
CredibleVoteNG seeks to eliminate that burden by providing a standardised and verified dataset that can be used simultaneously by multiple organisations.
Election monitoring experts say such access is particularly important for Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT), a globally recognised methodology used to independently verify election outcomes through polling unit-level data collection and analysis.
The platform’s creators argue that a common and publicly accessible electoral dataset can improve consistency among observer groups and strengthen confidence in election monitoring efforts.
The database may also prove valuable to journalists and media organisations, enabling them to verify polling unit distributions, scrutinise electoral claims and undertake data-driven reporting on voter access and representation.
The platform further highlights variations in polling unit distribution across the country. Lagos State has 13,325 polling units, Kano 11,222 and Kaduna 8,012, while Bayelsa has 2,244 and Ekiti 2,445.
Analysts say access to such information could encourage deeper discussions around voter accessibility, electoral logistics and resource allocation.
Political parties are also expected to benefit, as accurate ward and polling unit data are essential for deploying agents, monitoring election-day activities and identifying organisational gaps during campaigns.
Although the project has attracted limited publicity since its launch in March 2026, the founders say adoption has continued to grow through referrals and online searches.
Hosted on cloud infrastructure and verified across all states and the FCT, CredibleVoteNG is increasingly being viewed by election stakeholders as a practical contribution to transparency, civic participation and electoral accountability ahead of the 2027 general elections.
As preparations intensify for another election cycle, the emergence of a citizen-built platform providing free access to one of Nigeria’s most important democratic datasets underscores the role innovation can play in advancing transparency and strengthening public trust in the electoral process.