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DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ONLINE VOTING PORTAL

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the study

Elections form a critical process in democratic systems and application of information technologies to their management is a great milestone towards realizing effectiveness and efficiency not only in the results of the election process itself but also in the financial implications that come up with the process.

One basic feature of student’s unionism is the right to be able to choose their leaders by themselves through the processes of elections. And one basic feature of democracy that cuts across all divides of people is the act of election. Democracy thus encourages individual freedom according to the rule of law, so that people can behave and express themselves as they choose. This not only gives people the chance to choose their leaders, but also air their views on issues affecting their well–being. For a democratic government, public opinion is the most important determinant to establish a government and voting is the process through which people display their opinion and help to setup a democratic government. So the voting system should be reliable, accurate and above all must be transparent.

In the paper or manual voting system, a voter usually goes to the voting stations known as voting units. After direct person-person verification with some IDs, the voter is allowed to vote. The voter is then given a ballot paper which allows a single vote. Once the ballot paper is used, it cannot be reused. However, this ballot paper must also be anonymous as voters do not need to display their identity. I.e. to say, that the ballot paper must identify the voter as being permitted to vote, but not reveal their actual identity. Traditional polling methods trust a lot of parties during the election.

The various drawbacks of a traditional electioneering system are mainly collusion between the electronic officials and contestants, the queuing time, delayed results, overworked tallying officials and the undeniable fact of human errors. The existing voting system did not provide reliable statistics on voting history in the college and thus campaigners lacked the ground to apply scientific voter forecasting methods resolving to trial and error methodologies which are error prone and inconsistent.

Reinforcing a one voter one vote policy is difficult in such a situation and malpractices as rigging are not uncommon in manual voting system. It is impossible to completely rule out the need for technology and electronic voting, with the growing number of eligible voters and manual ballot papers involved. It was very easy or manageable in the past because, the institution had few numbers of students (eligible voters). But now the numbers of students have increased and have a high possibility of increasing higher, in the nearest future. It was manageable when we had just the NCE program and few courses on the degree program. But as real as it is now, the institution is growing beyond bounds and the manual system of voting which in so many previous Students’ union government (SUG) elections had caused more than a lot of chaos. The institution, Federal college of education (technical) Omoku, having adopted information technology in various fields of her dealings with students, the student union government should also adopt a new system of voting which is the electronic voting (E-voting) system.

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