How Realistic is Electronic Voting in Nigeria?

Hello, good people, great nation! What are we talking about implementing the electronic voting system? What is the general perception like? It all depends on the possibility of being able to implement it and not just mere say. I am glad Nigerians are being sensitised about the economic and political scenes via media but we have to really set the pace if really we want gain reputable international recognition.

No doubt here by the international community believing Nigeria adopted the idea of re-branding every sector of her economy and governance at large. If really we are good people and great nation then there couldn’t be any reason why electronic system of voting wouldn’t work. Electronic system of voting is excellent and wonderful. The idea is second to none and we should consider what we want as a re-branded nation and no going back to past and dubious lifestyle. Agreed? Yes of course!

Electronic system of voting should at least be embraced by Nigeria as a developing nation at least for the first time in her history. Something similar had been done a few years back and that was the ‘National ID Card’ right? And so we can improve on that in the subsequent elections. Meanwhile, many reactions and suggestions were taken into consideration. One genuine but funny question was about the epileptic power supply in the country and whether it could affect the electronic devices to be used for the counting. The answer is duo that is ‘yes’ and at the same time ‘no’. My friend recently said to me ‘with proper arrangement, devil could see God’ and it’s funny anyway but fact to hold on. And so with proper arrangement using best and sophisticated measures, the device could work for the estimated hours of voting without breaking down.

One of my readers commented ‘GIGO (i.e. Garbage-In-Garbage Out) is what determines and not power supply which could be taken care of.’ He gave me instance used by the programmers like ‘VARIABLES and COUNTERS’ and reasoned that if the thumbprint censor is programmed and activated to read the bio data of a franchise voter in Abuja, then the same voter cannot be legible to vote in another location say Lagos hence the same bio data appears twice but argued that it could be manipulated as far as the ‘COUNTER OPERATION’ is concern. His example is this: Variable A, B, C represents the Candidates to be voted for or the Political Parties while COUNTER X, Y and Z represent the initial unit of counting votes. He continued that if Party A say PDP is programmed to count X = 10 x 1, Party B say PPA programmed to count Y = 0 + 1 and Party C say ANPP programmed to count Z = 0 + 1, then the overall result per voter is X = 10, Y = 1, Z = 1 meaning there are still possible ways of rigging the election via the electronic system of voting. My good friend reasoned that it could be worsened if counters are deceitfully altered. For instance, it could be done such that if COUNTER Y or Z is equal or greater than COUNTER X, then COUNTER Y or Z is equals to Y=Y x ¼ or Z = Z x ¼ which means cut the numbers to quarter of the original figure. To elaborate more here it means that if X (for PDP) = 1200 votes, Y (for PPA) = 1200 and Z (for ANPP) = 3600 votes then after GIGO Compliant Computation (GIGOCC) the final result is X (for PDP) = 1200 votes!, Y (for PPA) = 300  and Z (for ANPP) = 900. Note that this is the normal vote count in the eyes of every Nigerian but the manipulations have been done. Wow! Consider manipulating the result of COUNTER Y and Z to x 1/8 whereas COUNTER X remains X = 10 x 1? What then do you expect? Isn’t it fraudulent? Yes of course it’s counterfeit!