How NGElections Works: Sources, Methods, and What We Won't Publish

Nigeria has 14,676 political candidacies in our database covering the 2023 general elections. Each one represents a real person who was listed on an official INEC candidate register. This is a brief explanation of how we built that database, where the data comes from, and the rules we apply before publishing anything.

The primary source: INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission publishes the official register of candidates for each election cycle. Every person in our database was drawn from INEC-published candidate lists: either the official PDF gazettes released before each election, or the certified results gazetted afterwards. If someone is not in an INEC document, they are not in our database.

This means the database is complete for 2023 in a specific, bounded sense: it covers everyone who INEC listed as a candidate across all five election types (presidential, governorship, senate, house of representatives, and state assembly). It does not cover people who merely announced intentions to run, or who were disqualified before appearing on the ballot.

Biographical data

Biographies are drawn from public, attributable reference sources and shown alongside the electoral record. We rely on material that is openly published and independently verifiable rather than anything we author ourselves, and we attribute it accordingly.

Factual data points like date of birth, educational background, and state of origin come from structured reference data, where each claim is tied back to a citation.

News articles

Each candidate page surfaces news coverage from Nigerian media outlets including Premium Times, TheCable, Punch, Guardian Nigeria, Daily Trust, Channels TV, Vanguard, and This Day. We verify each article link before displaying it. We do not republish article text; we link to the original source.

Coverage is not uniform. A sitting senator or governor will have dozens of articles. A state assembly candidate from a rural constituency may have none. We surface what exists in credible Nigerian media and do not manufacture coverage for candidates who have none.

Electoral results

Results are published only when INEC has certified them. We do not publish collation-stage or unofficial results. For the 2023 elections, we have certified results for the presidential race (18 candidates on the final ballot) and the governorship elections (423 candidacies with results). Senate, House of Representatives, and State Assembly results have not been individually released by INEC in a machine-readable format; we will publish them when they become available.

Status declarations for 2027

For candidates who are preparing to run in 2027, we track their declared status (speculated, expressed interest, declared, nominated, confirmed). Every status entry on the site requires a URL citation from a primary news source. If a politician announces a presidential bid on social media and it is not picked up and verified by at least one of our listed outlets, the status does not change in our database until it is.

This is stricter than most political sites, which often update statuses based on rumour or preliminary social media posts. We accept that our database will sometimes lag behind the news cycle as a result. We consider this a feature.

What we won't publish

We do not publish unverified allegations. We do not publish criminal records unless a conviction has been reported by credible media. We do not publish speculation about candidates' intentions unless a credible source has reported the declaration. For biographical data, we do not publish claims that cannot be verified against a public, attributable source or an INEC document.

If a candidate page on NGElections contains information you believe to be incorrect, contact us with the source you believe is accurate. We review corrections and update when the evidence supports a change.

Data corrections and the right to erasure

All information on NGElections relates to candidates for public office, sourced from official electoral documents. Public candidacy is a matter of public record. That said, we review any erasure request that involves a factual error, a person who did not in fact stand for election, or information that has become materially incorrect. Send corrections to hello@ngelections.com.