A Framework for Electronic Voting in Nigeria

Abstract

It is generally considered that a key component of electronic government in the future will be electronic voting, as a means of facilitating the participation of citizens in elections and public debates. The Nigerian 2015 general elections witnessed the use of electronic voters’ register, permanent voters’ card (PVC) and smart card readers for authentication of voters but actual ballot casting was still by manual means under a scheme called Re-Modified Open-Secret Ballot System (REMOBS). This paper proposed a framework for an electronic voting system that can be adopted for voting in Nigeria. The framework is capable of handling electronic ballots with multiple scopes at the same time, for example presidential, gubernatorial, legislative and so on. The framework caters for integrity of an election process through essential requirements of privacy, authenticity, accuracy, security, democracy and verifiability. The functional requirement in the design of the proposed framework requires well-secured identification and authentication processes for voters through the use of biometrics. Actual ballot casting is through direct recording electronics (DRE) voting machines connected together and with a central server over a private network.