An Online Voting Platform for Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission

Abstract

Elections in Nigeria has been plagued by vote buying, ballot box snatching, weak and independent(but dependent on the Executive) electoral management body, corruption and legitimacy crises as well as other forms of election malpractice, violence and irregularities. To curb the incidences of fraud, malpractice and the flagrant absence of transparency, this study introduces the concept of the design and implementation of an online voting platform (OVP) for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This application implemented with Python, a powerful web programming language suggests an impartial, electronic and easily managed form of conducting gubernatorial elections (in one of the states) in Nigeria. The database was created using MySQL. The analyses and design of the web application involved some unified modeling diagrams (case, class). The web application promises to eradicate several weakness of the existing system such as slower vote counting, physical location for conducting the gubernatorial polls, inconsistencies and errors resulting from the manual tasks, costliness of the election and most especially delay/ time wastage.