DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

The federal republic of Nigeria comprises of 36 states, The federal capital territory (FCT), and 774 local government areas (LGAs). The country is located in west Africa and shares land borders with the republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east and Niger in the north. The three largest ethnic groups in Nigeria are the Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba ethnic groups.

In Nigeria, General elections are conducted every four years, where a head of state the president and the national assembly representatives are elected. They are elected by the people. The national assembly has about 360 members representing various constituencies.

Most African electoral bodies with no exception to INEC, even with the advancements of technology, still use primitive paper based methods during voting; this system is characterized by manual form filling to chose leaders and transfer of information from manual data capture forms to computerized datasheets, this has led to a high number of mistakes making their way into the final votes count. The main advantage of the paper based system is the ballot papers are easily human auditable. The disadvantages outweigh the advantages for instance printing of ballot papers is slow, expensive, inflexible, environmentally hostile and also literacy limitations and last minute changes to the voter register are difficult to accommodate among others. Over the last few years some election observers have suggested the introduction of electronic voting at state and federal level. The online voting system mainly addresses the voting phase. Electronic voting process using the online voting system should be cheaper than the present paper based system been used by the independent national electoral commission (INEC). Online voting is an electronic way of choosing leaders via a web driven application. The advantage of online voting over the present manual system is that the voters have the choice of voting at their own free time and reduced congestion. It also minimizes on errors of vote counting. The individual votes are submitted in a database which can be queried to find out who the aspirants for a given post has the highest number of votes.

With the online voting system , a voter can use his/her voting right online without any difficulty. He/she has to register as a voter first before being authorized to vote. The registration should be done prior to the voting date to enable data update on the database.