Khalil Halilu
TECHNOLOGY as we know it is constantly changing the world, how we live in it and our relationship with it. And this is attributed to our constant need for development. When we hear or read E-voting, the first line of thought is the 2016 US Presidential elections and the subsequent controversies. But if we take a moment to examine what E-voting is and how it can forge a new path for Nigeria’s democracy, one might reconsider integrating technology for streamlining voting processes to deliver our voices legibly.
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With the help of advanced technology, we’ve decentralized community power and placed access to communities in the hands of the individual. A person using an internet enabled device is connected and feels like a part of the immediate and distant society. If democracy is about enfranchising an individual to make an input in a collective decision that affects their well being right, what better way to ensure that a single person’s opinion counts than devices designed to easily and quickly connect the one person to everyone else? To share, reinforce and empower beliefs.
I have listened severally to conversations where speakers’ advocacy for e-voting is hinged on pseudo-development which totally defeats the purpose of employing systems to stabilize democracy before the attempt is even made. If e-voting does not present the opportunity for security, accuracy, transparency, swiftness, privacy, auditability, accessibility, cost-effectiveness, scalability and ecological sustainability of the nation’s electoral system, it has no place here in Nigeria.
Nigeria is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic setting; and technology like this can be the consensus between people. In our society, what technology like this does is; it puts pressure on the system to deliver transparency, drastically reducing engagement of individuals in ensuring the smooth running of electoral processes. India has adopted e-voting, you can recognize this same need.
I know about the prospects of applying systems to the collation and transmission of votes and results through the insights obtained from the turn out of Zabe in 2019. Zabe is a crowdsourcing, election monitoring system. What it does is; as Nigerians vote and results are announced by INEC at the polling units, everyone with the app at a polling unit inputs the result data on the app, takes a picture of the pasted result sheet in that polling unit and uploads it on the app.
Using artificial intelligence, all the results that came in from all the polling units in the country were collated and the app logged 97 percent accuracy with the INEC official result which was a great achievement. With Zabe, and everyone that came on board we were able to add up all voting figures and publish it publicly. What systems like this do is, give citizens power and ensure the result of elections are transparent. The already available architecture used for electronic voting worldwide are mainly Paper-based electronic voting system, Direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting system, Public network DRE voting system, and Online voting.
Each of these electronic methods are individually unique, but all require both software and hardware resources to deploy, and of course technicians to monitor and maintain systems. Generally e-voting might cost a little more than paper and pen ballot but not a price too steep for transparency. This is not to say deploying technology to institutionalize voting is not flawless. It has been demonstrated that as voting systems become more complex and include software, different methods of election fraud become possible. These problems are however more about the computer than the fact that it is being put to use for voting.
There are so many ways to do it, there are devices that take off line records that can be transmitted via GPS, GPRS or GP Edge network which was the same thing used during Zabe election monitoring in 2019 and we had coverage in all the remote parts of the country without facing any challenge. There are technical block chains where we can apply technology for the result to be collated or imputed locally on the device. When there is a move to an area of one single bar of service, the results get transmitted.
Again, the system types also come into play. Who is authoring them? What strategy is being used to deploy them? It is always more than the fact that these computers are being used as voting applications. We have come to a place where, for the development of Africa, we need technology as much as we need Agriculture. With a growth mindset, working with the right stakeholders, testing and choosing the right technology to drive it, we will be fine.
Halilu is a techpreneur and founder/board chairman of the CANs, an eco-friendly tech hub in Abuja.
