DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN E-VOTING MOBILE APPLICATION

Abstract

The fundamental right to vote or simply voting in elections forms the basis of democracy. The conduct of periodic, competitive, participatory, credible and non-violent elections is one of the main yardsticks used to determine the democratic condition of a state. In Nigeria, elections have been conducted using the manual system of voting ever since we started practicing democracy in 1999, but these elections using the manual means, have been marred with a lot of electoral malpractices and hitches. These include; violent attacks on the voters, result manipulations, vote buying, remoteness of polling centers etc. These are enough reasons that necessitate the development and implementation of an electronic voting system that goes a long way in addressing most of these problems. Nigeria’s first ever electronic voting election was in introduced on February 6, 2018 in Kaduna state independent electoral commission (KAD-SIECOM). (KAD-SSIECOM) has appointed EMPTECH to provide an integrated electronic voting solution for the purpose of conducting local government council elections in the 23 local government councils of Kaduna state in 2018. The e-voting system aims at eliminating the bottlenecks evident in the manual voting system such as; the lengthy registration process, unnecessary movement of votes units, election violence and ultimately, the incredibility of the votes. This was achieved by developing a time effective registration platform which registers a voter and assigns a voter their voter’s card immediately. The voter also gets to vote from their nearest safe and convenient polling unit and their votes is counted where it belongs. The results obtained from subsequent tests were very impressive in terms of time, security and accuracy as compared to the manual system. Such system with all these capabilities will go a long in ameliorating the aforementioned problems of the existing manual system of voting in the Nigerian electoral process.