Enhanced Automated Biometric Web-Based Electronic Voting System for Nigeria

Nigeria's electoral system has been fraught with several challenges from the time of changing from manual accreditation/voting to electronic voters' accreditation/voting since March2015. Prior to 2015, Nigeria has tried several voters' registration and voting system, not limited to the manual open-ballot option-A4 brought about by the then General Ibrahim Babangida Administration in 1990s or the secret ballot voting system introduced later by successive electoral commissions. Despite transiting from manual-based voters accreditation to electronic-based voters accreditation via the use of smart card reader (SCR) and Permanent Voter Card (PVC) in 2015 general elections introduced by then INEC Chairman Prof. Attahiri Jega, there are still issues relating to rigging, malfunctioning of the smart card readers, electoral violence, snatching of ballot papers, vote buying, falsification of poll results, disenfranchisement of eligible registered voters and so on. All these anomalies still cast aspersion on the integrity of elections conducted by INEC – the Nigeria's electoral umpire. This paper attempts to identify the problems associated with the Nigeria's current electronic accreditation using biometric smart card readers (SCRs) and Permanent voters' cards (PVCs) and subsequent manual(offline) voting. This paper introduced automated online/web-based voting system integrated with biometric authentication system to identify or accredit genuine registered voters. This new innovation will enable eligible voters to vote from anywhere irrespective of the electoral ward or polling unit they registered in. This new voting system will save cost, reduces ballot box snatching, vote buying and mass thumb printing; it will discourage bribery, corruption and electoral fraud amongst others. This innovation will give more chance for all registered voters to vote from any location using computers or devices connected to the internet. This can make the result of voting from several polling units to be collated simultaneously and in realtime and give authentic and accurate result devoid of bias and manipulation. This system was implemented using Java Server Pages (JSP), HTML with Tomcat web server for testing. This system worked fine according to system's specification and functionality