Abstract
Electoral management is one of the recurrent discussions in emerging democracies across the globe. Issues of electoral fraud are most times predicated on the nature of electoral management since most elections in the affected countries are done manually. Improving on the electoral management has therefore become a focus of concern that the Nigerian state also aligned itself with in order to better its course of the democratic enterprise. Automation of electoral processes from the manual practice is primarily to address noticeable negativities associated with the manual system. This paper is an explanatory one that seeks to analyze the incentives, setbacks and challenges of the electronic voting system. The paper utilized secondary sources through careful analysis of literature on the subject matter in addition to personal observations and discussions among intellectual colleagues. The incentives of E-voting include but are not limited to reduction of electoral fraud, delays, manipulations of results and other irregularities including cost. The paper also maintains that the e-voting system has its own drawbacks in the forms of IT logistics, infrastructure, lack of trust, issues of transparency among other challenges. It concludes that there should be a pilot test at the micro level for an experiment before adopting on a large-scale national election, networking of government agencies to be fully IT compliant, inter alia.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0988/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>
Highlights
Poor electoral system is a major cause of insalubrious political competition among power contenders and leads to electoral violence (LeVan & Ukata, 2012)
Electronic voting technology can include punched cards, optical scan voting systems and specialized voting kiosks and is able to perform most of these tasks while complying with a set of standards established by regulatory bodies, and is capable to deal successfully with strong requirements associated with security, accuracy, integrity, swiftness, privacy, accessibility, costeffectiveness, scalability and ecological sustainability
Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting Machines With a DRE machine, voting can be done on Election Day or it can be used as an advance voting device in polling stations
Summary
Poor electoral system is a major cause of insalubrious political competition among power contenders and leads to electoral violence (LeVan & Ukata, 2012). The election circle in Nigeria is characterized by numerous problems Major among these problems include missing names of some registered voters, intimidation which leads to disfranchisement of voters, multiple and under-aged voting, snatching or destruction of ballot boxes, miscomputation and falsification of results (Alabi, 2009; Ogbaudu, 2011). A poor electoral system stimulates election-related violence with far-reaching consequences of eroding peoples' trust and confidence in the democratic process (Alemika 2011). The cumulative effect of the irregularities including but not limited to severely flawed voter lists, misuse of incumbency power, and lack of transparency; the actual or perceived bias of election officials resulting in real or perceived fraud stimulate electionrelated violence with far-reaching consequences of eroding peoples' faith and confidence in the democratic process (UN, 2012). The second objective is to know how e-voting can be a solution for the electoral irregularities associated with the manual voting process
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