Privacy and data audit

The Hybrid Trust Model, cryptographic deduplication, NDPA privacy disclosures, and spatial provenance behind AbiaVoters.

How we handle your data

What we collect: the LGA and ward you choose, your poll choices, the time of your vote, a label showing how it was checked, and hashed codes made from your device and network to stop repeat voting. If you share your location, we use it once to check it against your ward and do not store it.

What we don't collect: your name, phone number, email, or exact location.

Why: to count one vote per person per race and keep bots out. By voting you agree to this use of device signals; if you decline, you can't vote.

Who sees it: our hosting, database and security providers (Cloudflare, [database host], [web host]) process traffic for us, and they may keep their own technical logs. Data is stored in [region].

How long: [period]. Your votes cannot be traced to you by name. To ask what we hold or request removal, contact [email protected]; we'll explain what can be removed.

You must be 18 or older to vote. This is an unofficial opinion poll; it is not affiliated with INEC.

1. Four-Tier Hybrid Trust Model

Voters select their Local Government Area (LGA), INEC Registration Area (Ward), and — where a ward's State Assembly split is marked provisional — their State House of Assembly constituency, then optionally share hardware GPS location. Every ballot is classified server-side into one of four transparent tiers:

  • Verified (Default Standings View): Hardware GPS falls physically inside the voter's selected human-confirmed ward polygon (PostGIS ST_Contains / GeoJSON containment), with horizontal accuracy ≤150 metres, >30 metres clear of ward boundary edges, on a non-VPN Nigerian IP connection with zero velocity or cluster anomalies.
  • Located: Hardware GPS is physically inside Abia State, but falls outside the selected ward polygon, has coarser GPS precision (>150 m), sits within the 30 m boundary buffer, belongs to a ward awaiting human polygon alias confirmation, or is cast for a State House of Assembly race in a provisional ward (provisional Assembly ballots never exceed located).
  • Self-Declared: Voter selected their LGA and ward without sharing hardware GPS, and passed all Turnstile, device-deduplication, and network-integrity checks.
  • Flagged (Quarantined): Submissions exhibiting VPN/datacenter ASNs, foreign IP origin, impossible inter-LGA travel (>60 km within 10 minutes), or coordinate clustering (>6 devices at an identical ~11 m daily cell). Quarantined separately for administrator review and excluded from public standings.
  • Outside Abia Rejection: Any voter sharing GPS coordinates outside Abia State territorial boundaries is rejected outright (403 OUTSIDE_ABIA).

2. Ward Provenance & Conservative Boundary Handling

Abia State comprises 17 LGAs, 3 Senatorial Districts, 8 Federal Constituencies, 24 State House of Assembly Constituencies, and 184 INEC Registration Areas (Wards). Only whole-LGA State Constituencies are derived automatically; split-LGA wards require voter constituency selection and are capped at located for State Assembly until official INEC ward-delimitation gazettes confirm them. Likewise, wards without a human-confirmed 1-to-1 GRID3 polygon match never auto-assign geometry and cap voters at located.

3. Privacy by Design & Device Fingerprint Consent (NDPA Compliant)

In compliance with the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA), AbiaVoters enforces strict data minimization and requires explicit voter consent before verification:

  • Zero Coordinate Persistence: Exact GPS latitude and longitude are evaluated ephemerally in server RAM solely to check polygon containment and sign a short-lived single-use HMAC token. Raw or rounded coordinates are never written to any database table, application log, error report, or memory cache.
  • One-Way Device Fingerprint & Network Hashing: With your explicit consent on the ballot screen, non-identifying device attributes (screen dimensions, timezone, CPU core count, touch support, platform, User-Agent, persistent local token, and truncated /24 or /48 IP subnet) are hashed via keyed HMAC-SHA256 solely to enforce one-person-one-vote deduplication and block automated bot farming. Raw IP addresses and raw fingerprint strings are never persisted.
  • Single-Use Anti-Bot & Token Replay Guards: Cloudflare Turnstile tokens and signed ballot verification nonces (jti) are single-use and cannot be replayed.

4. Data Sources, License & Attribution

Ward boundaries: Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University, and GRID3. 2026. GRID3 NGA - Operational Wards v3.0. New York: Columbia University (https://doi.org/10.7916/2pfj-hq78). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Derived Abia boundary GeoJSON files are shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Operational health boundaries, not officially validated by INEC.

Electoral mapping & candidates: Derived from official INEC Abia State constituencies (184 Registration Areas, 36 contests, 21 parties, 468 candidates). Withdrawn candidates remain visible in historical audit records.

5. Civic Independence & Legal Disclaimer

AbiaVoters is an independent civic research and public opinion tracker. It is not an official election commission, does not certify official election tallies, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated in conjunction with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).