ELECTRONIC VOTING AND THE ELECTORAL PROCESS: A STUDY OF THE 2019 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The electoral process provides the electorate with the institutional framework for choosing leaders through a competitive free, fair, credible and acceptable election. Crucially, elections are the only acceptable institutionalized process enabling the recognised members of an independent society to choose their representatives. Relying on secondary data on some elections in Nigeria, the study established that Nigeria have had electoral flops, inconclusive elections emanating from electoral tensions, election infractions and irregularities. The study adopts public technology of procurement and innovation theory and used the descriptive method to unravel the relevance of e-Voting in Nigerian electoral process. The study discovered that the manual voting has done more harm than good to Nigerians and advocates the use of e-Voting system for the sole aim of having an accessible, transparent, free, and fair election with immediate feedback. The study found out that the 2019 Nigerian presidential election have been flawed by exploitation of the electoral process in form of the president’s rejection to sign the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill 2018, failure or non usage of the smart card reader machines, and logistic problems emanating from manual voting. The study therefore, recommends that the president should sign the amended electoral bill into law, that INEC and its Ad-hoc staff should use the card reader which Nigeria has plunged a whopping sum of N27.5billion to procure and which has been successful in developed nations. Finally, the study advocates for the use of E-voting in the Nigerian electoral process to reduce the problem of logistics during election.