Role
Developer & Product Lead
Skills
Bullets, Bribes & Ballots
- By the numbers. 3,312 petitions across six cycles, 943 in 2023, decided by 554 judges.
- Petitions by state. An interactive choropleth, shaded by volume and toggled by election year.
- Eight linked views. Outcomes, grounds, judgment length and judicial composition.
- Case judgments. Full rulings summarised, with the judgment PDFs.
- Why it exists. The record gathered and explained, in one place.
Overview
Nigerian Election Petitions (Bullets, Bribes & Ballots) is a public dashboard that gathers two decades of Nigerian election-petition cases, the judges who decided them, and how the Electoral Act has changed. It pulls an interactive map, charts of outcomes, grounds and judgment length, a register of the tribunal bench, and full case judgments from a single curated dataset, turning a record that used to sit scattered across tribunals and certified copies into something legible in one place.
Why was it built?
Court challenges have become a routine feature of contested Nigerian elections, and the tribunals and appellate courts that review them often decide who governs. Yet that record is hard to reach. Judgments sit scattered across tribunals and cycles, certified copies are costly and slow to obtain, and the reasoning inside them is written for election lawyers rather than the public. The project gathers that record and makes it legible, explaining both the result and the reasoning.
How is it built?
The dashboard is an Astro site with React islands, backed by Supabase for the dataset and the gated judgment PDFs. Every view reads from the same curated tables, so a figure that changes in the data changes everywhere at once.
- An interactive choropleth of petition volume by state, toggled across six election cycles.
- Linked views for outcomes, grounds pleaded, judgment length and the composition of the bench.
- A coded subset of fully adjudicated decisions, with the methodology shown alongside the figures.
- Full case judgments summarised in plain language, with the tribunal and appellate PDFs.
- A tracker comparing key provisions across five versions of the Electoral Act.
Results
- 3,312 petitions on record across six general-election cycles, 943 of them in 2023.
- 554 judges on the bench, with a register linking each to the cases they decided.
- A coded subset of fully adjudicated decisions, updated as more cases are added.
- Full judgments and Electoral Act provisions gathered in one searchable place.