Tuesday, February 28, 2023.
Lagos, Nigeria
At Civichive, we are committed to the principles of open data, and improving citizens’ participation in progressive governance and data transparency. Hence, we launched our one-of-a-kind, 2-in-1 platform—Roadmap to 2023 Election—to aid voters’ education and involvement in the electoral process. We want citizens to have unhindered access and understanding of how governance works, and the changes we can create together.
However, our attention has been drawn to different unscrupulous publications, tweets, and messages by some elements and persons making unfounded claims and unreasonable assumptions about our work, operations, and team.
Civichive as an entity is not and has never been funded by either a government agency or political structure. We reject any attempt by fake news peddlers and merchants churning out slanderous words about our people and process in their bids to shrink civic spaces like ours.
Our approach toward result collation is to work with credible grassroots organisations with an officer at each of the LGA collation centres to have quicker access to results. Indeed, the Situation Room of the CivicHive election results collation started at 07:00 hours on Sunday, February 26, 2023. We began to receive LGA-level results from our officers across the country, but as of 19:30 hours on Sunday, February 26, 2023, we had only received results from 139 LGAs from 23 States, with evidence of the INEC stamped LGA result sheet. By 21:00 hours that same day, we had collected data from 174 LGAs across 24 States.
It has become necessary for us to publish this statement to set the record straight. We have seen different reactions trending on social media as regards the data released on our platform— https://liveresults.civichive.org—and we will like to state that:
- The claim that the Ekiti state result was uploaded before the election is false. We only shared what was officially declared at the state’s collation centre which was corroborated by the declaration at the National Collation Centre. The timestamp of Feb 20 that was displayed on some of the screenshots from our website ( https://liveresults.civichive.org/) was a timestamp for the upload of registered voters for the state and not a timestamp for the upload of the election result.
- The purported photo of the Minister for Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola with a display of Presidential results from our portal (https://liveresults.civichive.org) along with unfounded claims of it being an INEC server is equally false. Our portal has been opened and accessible to the general public weeks before the elections.
The essence of this portal is to show the trend of cumulative results that keeps the citizens informed and not in any way an official platform for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to declare the results of the elections.
- For easy review and analysis, we designed the website to reflect the current political party leading in each state. There are colour codes randomly assigned to the four major political parties (APC, LP, NNPP, PDP). Each state’s colour is subject to change based on LGA results received at a particular time and date. For full info and analysis on each state, we encourage citizens to click on the state outline on the map to see the results breakdown and the number of LGA declared so far.
We pride ourselves in our community of active citizens working tirelessly to support our mission to build strong institutions, promote democratic principles, and improve citizens’ participation and involvement in governance. We hereby reiterate that Civichive is non-partisan and would never be part of any activities to undermine and sabotage the will of the people.
Sincerely
Temidayo Musa
Project Lead, RoadMap to 2023 Election Project
