21-09-2016, 04:03 PM
The Design and Development of Real-Time EVoting
System in Nigeria with Emphasis on
Security and Result Veracity
1455603173-evoting.pdf (Size: 910.99 KB / Downloads: 22)
Abstract — Elections are believed to be the key pillars
of democracy and voting is one of the electoral
processes that ensure the sustenance of democracy in
any civil society. In this paper, we developed an
electronic voting system, which will eliminate rigging
and manipulation of results to its barest minimum, this
problem is mostly associated with the manual system of
voting. The implementation of electronic voting system
in Nigeria will boost the integrity of INEC and the result
they produce. The programs used to develop this system
are PHP, MySQL, Java Query, CSS and HTML. These
packages make the Graphic Interface User friendly
enough for even those with little or no computer
knowledge.
INTRODUCTION
Elections are understood to be the key mainstay of
democracy all over the globe and voting is one of the
electoral routes that ensure the sustenance of democratic
system in any civilization. Voting is the process that
allows the general public or the people to choose their
leaders and articulate views on how they will be
governed. The veracity of democratic system is primary
to the veracity of election itself consequently the
election system must be satisfactorily secured to survive
a range of fraudulent behaviours and must be
sufficiently translucent and comprehensible that voters
and candidates can accept the outcome of an election.
Unsurprisingly, history is littered with examples of
elections being manoeuvred in order to change their
outcome.
Many parts of Nigeria have experienced setbacks,
which have led to the destruction of both lives and
property, simply because the rule of the game was not
adhered to, and so political violence, unhealthy
politicking have been the order of the day. People
usually wanting to impose themselves on the voters, so
they use all sorts of means to get into office. And this
has continued to cause a lot of harm and has made the
citizens poorer in spite of the abundance of natural and
human resources in the country.
On May 29, 2009 Nigeria celebrated a decade of
democracy. Many Nigerians said it was not worth
celebrating, because our electoral system is a flawed
exercise. Our political and electioneering process is
branded with so many irregularities, ranging from ballot
box snatching, stuffing of ballot boxes, political killings,
using of political thugs to harass opposing candidates
and finally weak Electoral Act. This mainly, is due to
the fact that electoral processes in Nigeria are done
manually and the result of such manual electoral process
inevitably produces questionable electoral results.
Elections in most developed nations of the world with
enviable democratic platforms has over the years been
conducted electronically and in these countries little or
no setbacks follow the results of such elections as they
are seen to be free, fair and credible. The Nigeria’s
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has
since indicated its interest in using the electronic voting
system for future elections. This decision has been as a
result of series of accusations leveled on the electoral
body by some political parties, for aiding a particular set
of political party especially in the 2007 and 2011
general elections to rig those elections.
If the Nations Electoral Commission is determined to
conduct a credible poll in the future elections, then
electronic voting should be seen as a veritable option to
achieve its aim. Electronic voting (also Known as
biometric voting) has been effectively implemented in some countries in Africa with Mozambique taking the
lead. As the most reliable solution to electoral fraud and
malpractice, Nigeria has been Africans largest needs to
follow suit in order to overcome the problems of mass
thumb printing of ballot papers by an individual, ballot
stuffing, snatching of ballot boxes, impersonation of
voters, errors due to manual collation of results and
multiple registration. Since equity and fairness are
symbols of a good democracy, if a real-time e-voting
system is implemented ―everybody will be happy at the
end of the day as the citizens will see that the elections
are transparent‖ and ill-motivated politicians will be
helpless at certain level to rig elections, hence programs
and policies that are people-oriented will be put in place.
An Automated Direct Recording Electronic Voting
System (ADREVOS) was proposed as an improved
electronic voting system for conducting efficient and
credible elections in Nigeria that consolidates security
as well prevent electoral fraud [1]. In another paper, a
computer-based e-voting system (Automated Voting
Machine-AVM) for future election in Nigeria. The
system imitates the automated teller machines (ATMs)
used by financial institutions for financial transactions
[2].
The rest part of the paper is organized as follows:
section II explained some related works; section III
covered materials and method; section IV deals with
results, while section V discussed about the conclusions
and recommendations before the references of the
research.