2027 elections: INEC required to create permanent database of polling unit results

In March 2023, Nigerians refreshed the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)’s IREV portal obsessively. The promise was that election results, from every polling unit, would be uploaded in real time as presiding officers transmitted their figures.

For the first time, ordinary Nigerians could theoretically watch their votes move through the system. Ward by ward, local government by local government, state by state.

What they got instead was a portal that loaded slowly, showed incomplete results, and became the centre of one of the most bitterly contested electoral disputes in the country’s history.

Sample of the 2023 Presidential Result on IREV

The Presidential Election Petition Tribunal and subsequently the Supreme Court both ruled on it. The fundamental question, whether the results on IREV matched the election results declared, was never fully resolved in the public mind.

The Electoral Act 2026 does not fix what happened in 2023. But it creates something that, if properly implemented, could make that kind of dispute significantly harder to sustain, or significantly easier to prove.

What the Electoral Act 2026 says about election results

Section 62(2) of the Electoral Act 2026 mandates the creation of the National Electronic Register of Election Results, described in the law as "a distinct database or repository of polling unit by polling unit results, including collated election results, of each election conducted by the Commission in the Federation."

The register must be kept in electronic format at INEC’s national headquarters and maintained on a continuous basis.

Section 62(3) goes further. It states that any person or political party may obtain from INEC, on payment of a prescribed fee, a certified true copy of any election result in the database, for any state, local government, ward, or polling unit, in either printed or electronic format.

This is not a portal. It is not a dashboard. It is a statutory, permanent, publicly accessible archive of Nigerian election results at the most granular level possible (the polling unit) going back to every election INEC has ever conducted.

Why this matters

Nigeria has 176,846 registered polling units. In a general election cycle, each one produces a result. Under the new law, every single one of those results must be stored permanently, maintained continuously, and made available to any member of the public who asks and pays the fee.

Voting exercise at a polling unit in Nigeria

The implications for election integrity work alone are significant. Independent researchers, civil society organisations, and journalists would, for the first time, have a legal right to request certified copies of polling unit results and compare them against declared outcomes at ward, local government, and state levels.

The kind of result-sheet-by-result-sheet verification that civic groups attempted manually in 2023, at enormous cost and effort, would become a structured, repeatable process.

The civic tech possibilities extend further. A properly maintained database of this kind would allow pattern recognition across election cycles, identifying polling units where turnout figures are statistically anomalous, constituencies where results shift dramatically between collation levels, or areas where accreditation numbers and vote counts diverge.

In established democracies, this kind of granular electoral data underpins entire industries of academic research, investigative journalism, and electoral monitoring. Nigeria has never had it in statutory form before.

3 questions nobody is asking INEC

1: Has INEC budgeted for this?

Building and maintaining a permanent, continuously updated database of results from every election in Nigeria’s history is not a minor IT project. It requires server infrastructure, data governance protocols, backup systems, and ongoing maintenance contracts. INEC’s 2023 technology procurement faced significant scrutiny over value for money.

There is no public indication that a database of this scope has been scoped, costed, or contracted.

Joash Ojo Amupitan – INEC Chairman

2: How far back does “each election conducted by the Commission” go?

The law says the register shall cover every election INEC has conducted. INEC has been conducting elections since 1999. Are results from 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2015 going to be digitised and included? If so, from what source documents?

Many of those results exist only in paper form in state offices around the country. The retroactive digitisation challenge alone is a significant undertaking.

3: What is the prescribed fee, and who sets it?

Section 62(3) makes access subject to “such fees as may be determined by the Commission.” That discretion matters. A fee set prohibitively high effectively negates the public access provision.

A fee structure that distinguishes between individual researchers and large organisations could determine whether this database becomes a genuine civic resource or a bureaucratic formality.

The post 2027 elections: INEC required to create permanent database of polling unit results first appeared on Technext.