WITH the recent development of interest in electronic voting, the Independent National Electoral Commission appears set on a revolutionary path that could straighten up Nigeria’s sordid and ungainly electoral system. For those who have been canvassing the automation of voting in the country’s elections, therefore, the waiting game could be over by as early as next year, going by the pronouncement of the INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu.
In a response to the health threats posed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the INEC boss promised to “work towards the full introduction of electronic voting in major elections, starting from 2021.” That surely gives room for the trial run of the system for a decent period of two years before the 2023 general election.
That is just the way to go because cutting-edge technology now rules the world. But there is the need for caution. E-voting can mean a variety of things, from voting via a device rather than a paper ballot to remote voting via Smartphone. According to the BBC, fears that e-voting machines could be hacked have caused some to warn against their adoption in some countries. One question Yakubu’s INEC will have to answer is: will e-voting ensure accuracy, transparency, verifiability, reliability, security, anonymity, and privacy? Whichever one is adopted, e-voting involves the use of computerised machines that use electronic ballots instead of the familiar paper ballots.
When fully implemented, it will be the culmination of more than five years of the electoral body’s experimentation with technology in the organisation of elections. The advent of the Smart Card Reader and Permanent Voter Card in the 2015 and 2019 elections, to a reasonable extent, helped to bring sanity to the elections. Introduction of technology has seen to a drastic reduction in the incidence of impersonation and multiple voting that usually marred elections.
Although e-voting will discourage the mass gathering of people, in line with the COVID-19 containment protocol, it has benefits far beyond the maintenance of physical distancing. It has the potential to sanitise the electoral process, which is currently bogged down by violence, restriction of movements as well as the pathetic inability of the electoral body to overcome the challenges of logistics. They have all come with high costs in terms of human lives and economic and social disruption.
During the last elections of 2019, for instance, no fewer than 626 people were reportedly killed in violence that occurred across the country, worse than the 106 cases recorded in 2015, but not up to the more-than 800 that Human Rights Watch said died during the 2011 elections. The Nigerian Civil Society Situation Room said the 626 deaths covered the period the campaign started in October 2018 to March 2019, when the elections were concluded. A Reuters report quoting the same Situation Room, a coalition of over 70 civil society organisations that monitored the elections, said 47 people died from violence during the presidential election alone.
This is an unacceptable price to pay for any Nigerian aspiring to perform a civic duty. During elections, there is usually a complete lockdown, where inter- and intra-state movements are strictly forbidden. The economic cost of this is incalculable at the level of individuals and as a nation. Performing the civic responsibility of casting a ballot should not attract more than minimum discomfort. It should not be an occasion for politicians to stockpile weapons and then unleash hoodlums on law-abiding citizens.
The result is usually an election that leaves a big question mark on its transparency and legitimacy. In its report on the 1999 elections, observers from the Carter Centre said, “It is not possible for us to make an accurate judgement about the outcome of the presidential election.” These atrocities are some of the vices that the automation of the electoral system will be expected to take care of. Our democracy depends on addressing these vulnerabilities. The mere reduction of human involvement in most stages of the process is expected to increase its transparency.
When the PVC and the SCR were introduced by the Attahiru Jega-led INEC in 2015, it was obvious that only a complete transition to a full e-voting system would suffice. Nigeria could not afford to continue in the path of anachronism when other African countries were already forging ahead with electronic form of voting. Countries that have adopted e-voting on the continent include Namibia, which, according to the BBC, blazed the trail in 2014, and Congo Democratic Republic. Other countries such as Ghana and Kenya have had strong digital components in their elections. In all, 33 countries globally had already adopted e-voting as of 2018, according to data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
Although it is believed to produce faster and more accurate results, it is not as if e-voting is a panacea for all election-related problems that have been burdening the country. In countries in which elections have been digitalised, complaints of hacking of the computer are common, especially by the losing parties. In the case of Kenya, for instance, the court had to invalidate the presidential election of 2017, ordering a rerun that was still won by the incumbent.
So, INEC has to be painstaking in deciding the type of electronic voting it intends to introduce that should be suitable to the peculiarities of the country. In some cases, a voter could sit at home and punch the computer to vote. The usual excuses about the country being too large to be covered effectively can no longer be tenable. If a country like India, the largest democracy in the world, with over 1.3 billion people, can effectively deploy electronic voting, there is no reason why Nigeria should not. In all this, INEC’s rigorous and diligent planning is imperative.
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