Nigerians Built a Platform to Track Election Results Live

When Nigeria counted votes in its 2023 presidential election, citizens waited four anxious days for official results while misinformation flooded social media. Now a new platform is putting that power directly into voters' hands.

E Don Kast, launched in 2025 by urban planner Femi Olamijulo, lets anyone at a polling station photograph official result sheets and upload them instantly. The name comes from Nigerian Pidgin for "a secret that's gone public," and that's exactly what it does with vote counts.

The platform solves a problem millions of Nigerians experienced firsthand. Even though Nigeria's electoral commission introduced a digital portal in 2020, uploads during the last election were slow and incomplete. Two months after voting ended, nearly 6% of results still hadn't appeared online.

Meanwhile, citizens were already documenting everything on their phones. Videos of vote counting and photos of result sheets spread across WhatsApp and Twitter, but without structure or verification. E Don Kast channels that grassroots energy into something useful.

Here's the clever part: multiple people can upload results from the same polling station. When several submissions match, the system assigns a confidence score and publishes the numbers. If reports conflict, it waits for more data before showing anything. Once uploaded, no one can alter the figures.

The platform has already mapped more than 176,000 polling units across Nigeria. Results appear on an interactive map, making it easy to spot patterns and compare neighboring areas. Voters can see which stations have reported and get an early picture of outcomes before official tallies arrive.

Olamijulo got the idea from living in the United States, where election results flow publicly as votes are counted. He tried working with Nigerian government institutions but hit bureaucratic walls. Building independently, he realized, would preserve credibility in a system where many citizens already distrust the official process.

The Ripple Effect

E Don Kast isn't trying to replace Nigeria's electoral commission. It's amplifying what citizens were already doing, turning scattered social media posts into structured, verifiable data that everyone can access.

The platform tested successfully during recent local elections in Nigeria's capital territory. As the 2027 general elections approach, it offers something powerful: a way for ordinary Nigerians to hold their democracy accountable, one smartphone photo at a time.

When citizens become the transparency layer their institutions haven't yet provided, that's not just good technology—it's democracy getting stronger from the ground up.