Deployment of GSM phones Assisted Registration for Voting in Nigeria
Momoh A. Mohd- Sanusi · International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology · 2018
In democratic societies, voting is an important tool in collecting and reflecting people's opinions.In Nigeria and most of the developing countries, electoral processes proceeding democratic governance is characterized with high rate of fraudulent practices and irregularities.This research work therefore, in a quest to give a solution to these problems, has developed a Mobile-based GSM Phones Assisted Registration and voting system (MGARVS) for Elections in Nigeria.The system is designed using Iterative and Incremental development methodology.The software was developed using Java Server Package (JSP), JavaScript, Java Bean, HTML, Java Servlet and MySQL as the database.On the part of the users of the application, a GSM phone with internet enabled is required to effectively carryout the voting.Finally, from the research instrument used, it has clearly shown that with this Model, will increase voters' participation, reduce cost of conducting elections, and eradicate the monster of ballot box snatching and electoral violence. I.BACKGROUND OF STUDY Voting is a critical feature of any democratic process and is a vital expression of the people's power (Reddy and Raghavan, 2009) in which the methods vary from traditional voting systems to electronic voting systems (Ofori-Dwumfuo and Paatey, 2011).Traditional voting systems include voice vote, the use of stones/balls, and also paper-based system (Carback III, 2010).Nigeria still uses the old method of paper-based voting system up till today with its numerous challenges despite the incorporation of semielectronic voting in 2015 election (Omolaye et al., 2015).The method of voting using ballot paper consumes time and can lead to many problems (Ekong and Ekong, 2010) and (Aker et al., 2011), including: voters not able to vote due to long queues; intolerable percentage of a very high lost, stolen, or miscounted ballot papers; very large number of invalid or unclear ballot papers, inadequate preparations to accommodation for disable persons; climatic conditions might as well make voters feel reluctant to walk long distances to polling booths to perform their civic rights by way of voting; harassment/intimidation of prospective would be voters by party Agents.According to (Ekong and Ekong, 2010) time and resources incur by human through old voting method can be saved by simplified procedures of electoral process using ICT.Automating an election process by total submission and relying on state-of-the-art in ICT technologies, can tremendously mitigate many of the factors that would destroy or hamper a healthy progress of a given election process.For automated e-Voting processes to be fully accepted by citizenry, several issues must be addressed and resolved in terms of authentication/validation, security, robustness, performance and correctness (Omolaye, et al., 2015).In today society, movement has become one of the most vital ICT pattern, affecting all views of modern life (Kumar and Ravikanth, 2009).As result of such technological breakthrough by world of ICT, using a system of mobile service will provide complex and more sophisticated service.Mobile phones exhibit some unique characteristics that distinguish them from the online medium (Little and Duncan, 2011).These ubiquitous devices are portable, affordable and in wide-spread use today, with about a third of the world's population having at least one.This phenomenon offers instant connection from different resources anywhere all around the globe to entertainment, information family and friends.The execution of successful elections is the foundation of political stability and the definite way to establish democracy in the polity.The application of an effective voting system is the rudimentary ingredient for the conduct of a credible, fair and acceptable election.Since independence in 1960, Nigeria has grappled, without success, with the ways and means of ensuring the conduct of credible and acceptable elections.It is in view of the above that the researcher deems it fit to embark on, "A Model of MGARVS for Nigeria", with the hope that this research work, when fully implemented will increase the effectiveness of the voting process, reduce cost and time, increase security, increase turn-out and accessibility of Information on voting system in Nigeria.