About
What Binchika is, and isn’t.
Binchika is a citizen transparency layer. It compares photos of polling-unit result sheets with INEC's IReV uploads, then publishes the comparison with confidence levels so anyone can audit it.
Binchika is not an election authority. It does not declare winners, project victories or replace INEC. Only INEC declares official results.
The name comes from the Hausa verb bincika: to investigate, examine, look into. The logo is the agogo, a West African double bell that has long been rung to call people's attention and carry messages.
Our rules
- No party advertising, sponsorship or paid placement, in any form.
- All registered parties get the same card, the same fields and shuffled positions. Colours are assigned alphabetically and carry no meaning.
- Every fact has a source. Anything not yet verified is labelled.
- Discrepancy flags always show the sources and the reason. They are not accusations.
- No personal data is collected until a privacy policy compliant with the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 is published.
- The code, the confidence thresholds and the ledger are public.
The full rules are in the project constitution.
Risks & limitations
We publish these because pretending they don't exist would be worse.
Legal
- Binchika numbers are not official results. Treating them as official would be misinformation, which is why the INEC notice is on every page.
- A wrongly flagged discrepancy could harm reputations. Flags need consensus, show their evidence, and are corrected publicly in the ledger.
- Data protection (NDPA 2023): reporter handles are stored only as salted one-way hashes. Nothing personal is collected yet.
- Platforms like this may face official or political pushback. The ledger's copies on GitHub and IPFS are designed to survive that.
Technical
- At 176,846 polling units, coverage will be uneven. Missing units are shown as missing and never estimated.
- Machine reading of handwriting makes mistakes. Low-certainty reads go to human verifiers.
- Social platforms change their APIs and rate limits. Ingestion uses several channels with retries and queues.
- Internet shutdowns and attacks are possible. The site is static and served from a global edge network. Offline and SMS fallbacks are planned.
Trust
- The news reel reflects what the press chooses to cover, which often favours incumbents. We take headlines from eight outlets in turn so no single outlet dominates, but we do not rebalance by party, because that would itself be an editorial choice.
- The ledger's demo mode uses made-up parties and units with no real states, behind a striped warning banner, so a screenshot cannot pass as results.
- Any hint of partisanship would end the project. Equal coverage, alphabetical colours and public code are there to prevent it.
- Bias in choosing verifiers is checked with published screening rules and a regional-balance filter.
Operational
- Volunteers' safety and anonymity come before speed.
- Election-day traffic will spike. Static pages and edge caching are the defence.
- Volunteers drop out over time. Training is short, and every region has backup verifiers.
Contact
- [email protected]: party manifesto submissions, data requests and party communication.
- [email protected]: website maintenance, technical and operational requests.
- [email protected] sends announcements, verifier notices and account confirmations. Replies still reach a person.
Data sources & licences
| Data | Source | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Election dates (16 Jan & 6 Feb 2027) | INEC revised timetable, Electoral Act 2026 (report) | Verified |
| 22 registered parties | INEC register | Verified 24 Oct 2026 |
| State and LGA boundaries | GRID3 via geoBoundaries, CC BY 4.0 | Verified |
| 774 LGAs per state | Constitution 1999, First Schedule, cross-checked against GRID3 | Verified |
| House seats per state (360) | INEC federal constituency delimitation | To re-check |
| Wards, polling units, registered voters | INEC 2023 figures | To update for 2027 |
| Party logos | Official assets on inecnigeria.org, backgrounds removed for display | 21 of 22 (INEC has none for Accord) |
| Registered voters by sex and age | INEC final 2023 register, as reported by Channels TV | Official, 2023 |
| World map | Natural Earth 1:110m (public domain), Equal Earth projection | Verified |
| Country facts | World Bank WDI (CC BY 4.0), Wikidata (CC0), world-countries (ODbL). Each figure shows its year and source. | Automated, cited |
| Nigeria independence date | Nigeria Independence Act 1960 | Primary source |
| News reel | Headlines and links from eight established outlets via their public feeds | Automated, not endorsed |
| Results | INEC IReV + citizen photos of Form EC8A | From election day |