Egnr. Ojonimi Agada is a Nigerian innovator, who over the years has bagged several national awards for his gestures towards the growth of Nigeria’s STI. He says his e-voting invention to break free from negative impressions of elections poised in society. BINTA SHAMA reports.
Why the e-voting system?
Research has shown that the implementation of e-voting in Nigeria’s electoral system will boost the credibility of elections by reducing the risk of double voting and voided votes. Brazil, Estonia, Canada, Namibia, South Africa, USA, India and many other countries have been making use of e-voting for years gone by. In view of the loss of lives, properties, rigging, and other violence related incidents recorded during elections in Nigeria. It is imperative to design a system that will mitigate the above-mentioned demerit while providing a robust voting system. It is in this light that the IKANI e-voting call apparatus was designed. The aim of this invention is to provide electronic voting solutions that will reflect the choice of citizens while mitigating other factors of electoral manipulation we see in several states of the federation. However, with electoral fraud being perpetuated, as concerned citizens, we see it as a grievous problem proffering solutions to make our nation better and compete with other developed nations.
Benefits of e-voting system
Another objective of this design is to reduce the cost of electronic materials by 60 per cent. We all know that the cost of elections in this country is very high. For instance in 2019, the cost was around N200bn and subsequently, it keeps rising in a geometrical progression. It will also help to reduce the duration for collation to the barest minimum because one of the major problems we have in Nigeria is collation. When voting is done manually, it takes days or even weeks for collation to be made and in the process manipulation sets in and results are falsified. Another is to prevent the shutdown of the economy during elections which leads to loss of billions of naira. You will agree that Nigeria loses a lot of money by shutting down the economy at every given time. It prevents rigging during the election and it also helps prevent loss of lives which is always a result of electoral violence. We also observed that during elections, the youths are the most vulnerable and that way they are paid to act as thugs in the process some of them get killed along the line.
It provides free, transparent, and fair elections without prejudice on the electoral umpire. We all observed that INEC is still in process of giving this nation a free and fair election. For instance, one of the aspect is the use of finger print, if we have an individual who thumb prints using this invention, we won’t have a problem because the thumb print is already captured on INEC database which the system matches the template and identifies the person and it will help legal process to give justice as far as post election cases are concerned and none of this are being done but rather INEC use fingerprint to identify a voter before carrying out his franchise which to me is an oversight. The essence of fingerprint is to be able to carry out forensic audit on who did the e-voting because with someone’s I.D, you can get every detail about the individual. So why use a fingerprint template to carry out the data? Here, with my voter ID I can bring out every field that has been captured during the production of the card, so there is no need for INEC to use fingerprint to test run the identification of the owner where the image and common details are on the card. So when they aren’t supposed to use fingerprint technology they use it and when they aren’t supposed to keep on deploying i.e. portraying the dependency of the Commission. The invention also provides capacity of the GPS location to and from polling units. It has a feature that helps monitor the returning officers. For instance, the GPS of each polling unit would being taken prior to the general election so that every activity is captured and can help identify if there is any trouble in the cause of carrying out their duty and monitor every of the processes. It identifies each of the accreditation done by these officers at every given time in the indirect e-voting system because we have two of this designs i.e. the direct e-voting system which uses the android application technology, where one votes in the comfort of activities, space and time, where there won’t be need for national shut down. For the indirect system where the rural areas aren’t technologically serviced, knowledgeable or lack android apps. Within, it gives us an opportunity to input the count whenever an election is done. The returning officer enters it into the android app and sends it automatically which will now also send the count to the server. While monitoring from a distance on the check of a returning officer, we are able to know the number of those accredited and that automatically is evidence that the officer won’t be able to reverse nor accredit people beyond the stipulated number saved and trying to do that from his location will be impossible as there would be a conflict.
Invention’ll minimise electoral fraud
With all of this, my ‘invention will help minimise and cure electoral fraud,’ and it will interest you to know that those in the rural areas that might have voted with their android app can’t re-do it because such a person would have been identified, showing that they have been accredited automatically. The method used here is based on facts and experiences gained from national elections in Nigeria, these issues are ballot boxes snatching, violence, and killings, are the issues we normally have during election. This particular invention stands to mitigate all of these because it may be a digital ballot box with direct e-voting and there would be physical paper ballot for the direct election, counting will be done but the posting of the results will be automated for villages where the people there aren’t I.T inclined. Ballot boxes snatching will be limited, so you can’t return beyond what is already recorded in that very centre. So youths will no longer be killed as most of them will carry-out their voting independently/electronically. So the products, used now in this system is the design of indirect or direct e-voting app, database to pass the data’s that will come from this android app development and design of real polling web base results bill interface. You know, when we say electronic voting people will begin to think that you have to go to the website and open an e-voting Nigerian website to register and begin to carry out your e-voting just like we use to have opinion poll on the internet but the trend is different because we don’t want anybody to hijack our archive. This invention in particular stands to eradicate all of this menace so that the youths who are supposed to be the leaders of this country will not just get killed for nothing.
