CHALLENGES OF ICT DEVELOPMENT

IN NIGERIA ELECTORAL PROCESS

Engr. Chidi Nwafor, FNSEDirector, ICT

18th November 2015

Introduction of ICT to its internal processes - setting up of LANs at the HQ and in all its 36 State offices and the FCT

INEC commenced real technological drive in 2002: Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology for Voter Registration.

Move from a manual voter enrolment process to a technologically driven process was a huge leap by the Commission;

Move graduated into giant strides aimed at improving the way and manner in which elections are conducted – aimed at improving electoral processes and operations.

These moves have not been smooth rides all the way, as issues and challenges kept erupting at regular intervals;

Gratefully, the Commission kept surmounting the surmountable, while it has always found ways round the insurmountable.

INTRODUCTION

NIGERIAN ELECTORAL SYSTEM AND PROCESSES

INEC was established by the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to among other things organize elections into various political offices in the country;

The functions of INEC as contained in Section 15, Part 1 of the Third Schedule of the 1999 Constitution (As Amended) and Section 2 of the Electoral Act 2010 (As Amended) are nine (9) in number, but could be summarized as follows: Organise, undertake and supervise all elections in the Country

(except Elections into elective offices in the Local Government Areas); Register Political Parties and monitor their activities; Registration of persons qualified to vote and maintenance of the

register of voters; Conduct voter and civic education; and Promote knowledge of sound election processes.

NIGERIAN ELECTORAL SYSTEM AND PROCESSES …2

ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM (EVS) has four components: Electronic Voter Register (EVR) Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) Electronic Voter Authentication (EVA), and Electronic Transmission of Results (ETR).

INEC has been able to actualize three of the four processes - excluding Electronic Voting Machine;

The EVR fulfills the Commission’s mandate of registration of persons eligible to vote;

the EVA and ETR accomplishes the function of organizing credible elections in the Country. The application of technology to other areas has been minimal, we shall not be considering this in this paper.

NIGERIAN ELECTORAL SYSTEM AND PROCESSES

Any electoral system has the following key processes:

Voter Registration

Voter Authentication Balloting Vote Collation Vote

Transmission

These processes are all encapsulated in the EVS

ICT INNOVATIONS INTO THE ELECTORAL PROCESS

The fundamental challenge of any EMB is to be able to offer free, fair and credible elections.

The electoral process includes the selection of candidates, the registration of voters and the voting procedures, and the procedures leading to these three activities must be said to be credible. Manual processes are known to be prone to manipulations, human interventions and fraud, hence the need to apply technology to: reduce human interference; produce credible processes; produce results from processes in a timely manner; improve the accuracy of the processes.

The challenges to the deployment of ICT in Nigeria electoral processes cannot be discussed without first considering the technologies that have been deployed.

ICT INNOVATIONS INTO THE ELECTORAL PROCESS - EVR …2

In considering areas to apply technology to, INEC started from the fundamentals – which is the register of voters;

The process of registering voters and producing voter lists is one of the most important and time-consuming activities carried out by EMBs. Before the conduct of any election, there must be a voter register that contains names and details of all those eligible to cast their vote in an election;

A voter register that is not credible can only compound the problems in the electoral process by making it difficult for the outcome of the election itself to be widely acceptable.

Before the adoption of technology in the electoral process in Nigeria, Voters register had been compiled using the manual method: Before every General Election, the Electoral Commission must move to all the

PUs to conduct the exercise – manual register cannot be updated; The manual register was fraught with many inaccuracies and was believed to be

unduly over bloated with under-aged and and duplicate registrations Compilation of an electronic register became imperative.

HISTORICAL EFFORTS IN VOTER REGISTRATION IN NIGERIA

Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) Technology – 2002

This technology reads the presence or absence of a mark on a form.

Marks were made on the OMR forms to signify characters.

These OMR forms are scanned, converted into digital formats and stored in the database.

The register produced from this exercise was used for the conduct of the 2003 Elections but were discarded because of the enormous exceptions generated from non-well shaded forms.

HISTORICAL EFFORTS IN VOTER REGISTRATION IN NIGERIA …2

Direct Data Capture – Handhelds -2006

32,000 handheld devices to capture details (biodata, two thumbprints and photograph) of each intending voter;

These registers were used for the conduct of the 2007 General Elections;

However, due to the irregularities associated with the registers, not the technology adopted, the registers were jettisoned;

Irregularities arose from the late arrival of machines for registration making people go in search of machines instead of waiting for the machines to get deployed to centres close to them – led to double registrations and misplaced voters (one machine/4 centres)

HISTORICAL EFFORTS IN VOTER REGISTRATION IN NIGERIA …3

Direct Data Capture Machines (DDCMs) – 2011

Captured the biodata, photograph and the ten (10) fingerprints of most registrants;

132,000 DDCMs were procured to enable each Registration Centre (RC) have a dedicated DDCM and 10% for redundancy;

Register adjudged to be the best register produced by INEC, used for two General Elections.

ICT INNOVATIONS INTO THE ELECTORAL PROCESS - EVA

Voter Authentication is the process of verifying that the person that registered to vote is the same person that is at the polling station to cast his vote;

This process takes place during the accreditation of voters on election day;

Voter accreditation has hitherto been manual, exposing the process to human manipulations and fraudulent practices;

The manual process was improved upon in 2011 with the introduction of accreditation before voting – ensuring that voting commences about the same time in all the Polling Units.

For the 2015 General Election however, INEC decided to apply technology to optimize the process with the advent of the Permanent Voter Card (PVC) and the Smart Card Reader (SCR).

ICT INNOVATIONS INTO THE ELECTORAL PROCESS - EVA…2

Accreditation process was broken down into three: Identification - physical comparison of the face of the card holder with

the image displayed on the SCR when the PVC is read; Verification (that the card is original) - being able to read the

information on the chip of the PVC presented; Authentication - comparison of the fingerprint stored on the card with

what was physically presented and scanned by the reader;

Once a PVC has been read and accredited by the SCR, the Voter Identification Number (VIN) is stored in the reader and it does not allow the accreditation of that VIN on that particular reader any longer.

The use of the PVC and SCR gave a lot of credibility to the 2015 Electoral Process, as it greatly assisted in ensuring one-man-one-vote.

ICT INNOVATIONS INTO THE ELECTORAL PROCESS - ETR

Secure migration of election result from the polling unit to the point of collation;

INEC has not been able to actualize the desire to use Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) for the main balloting;

This phase of the election process however handles: the collation of the results of the election and the transmission of same to a central database

The electronic results collation and transmission (e-Collation) system has been piloted in some bye-elections – it is a robust and well secured platform that collects data from the Polling Units (PUs) and collates the results up to the required level for any set Election.

The system will also be used for the forth-coming Governorship Elections in Kogi & Bayelsa States.

CHALLENGES TO THE DEPLOYMENT OF ICT

The LAW:

Electronic Voting - S.52(1b) of the Electoral Act 2010 (As amended) states that “The use of electronic voting machine for the time being is prohibited”.

SCRs – misquote S.52(1b) The use of SCR is not Electronic Voting, voter accreditation is not voting; The Election Petition Tribunals have had to throw out evidences relating to the use

of SCRs, I feel this issue needs proper debating by our “learned friends”. If this trend continues, then the election credibility that has accrued via the use of SCRs will be eroded.

Diaspora Voting - S.54 of the Electoral Act 2010 (As amended) states “No voter shall record his vote otherwise than by personally attending at the Polling unit and recording his vote in the manner prescribed by the Commission”. Personal appearance at the PU is the restriction to the deployment of this.

Prosecution of Election Offenders - The Commission has had to hand over some election offenders to security agencies for prosecution, but the case ends there, eg Anambra case

CHALLENGES TO THE DEPLOYMENT OF ICT …2

FUNDING:

Technology is very capital intensive; and for an organization that executes key functions like INEC funding should not be an issue.

The Commission for instance commenced a WAN project in 2010 to enable the migration of its voter registration databases from the State offices to a central database at the Headquarters, and also for the migration of data to its disaster recover sites. This was basically to ensure secured data transfer on our channels. However, the project became unsustainable as there were no funds to keep it running.

Also affected are other salient processes that would better have been fully automated, but we have had to apply some manual interventions at some levels.

CHALLENGES TO THE DEPLOYMENT OF ICT …3

Political Class:

The Commission has mandatorily ensured that right from the planning stage, valuable time and resources are spent to “sell” its technological plans to the Political Parties.

Yet, the politicians are the group of people who look for loopholes, or even create them, to make our processes non-credible.

Politicians induce the populace to indulge in multiple registrations either by moving from one PU to another or by registering using special registration options meant for people who are physically challenged.

The use of SCRs also met some brick walls in some section of the political class, there were efforts at frustrating its use – even on election day. The issues that resulted in the reverting to manual accreditation process during the just concluded Presidential and National Assembly Election of 28th March 2015 were partly funded by some politicians.

CHALLENGES TO THE DEPLOYMENT OF ICT …4

CHANGE FACTOR:

Nigerians, generally, find it difficult to shift from our comfort zones; the introduction of technology to the electoral process has met with brick walls at some quarters.

People are used to the old ways of doing things, and all they look out for is how to beat the system. We have found cases where underaged persons are found in the register, people try to register using palm kernels for fingerprints, registration using still images, etc.

The old method of trying to over blot the register of voters still thrives, but INEC has always ensured that all efforts are put in place to check these vices – through our improved AFIS system.

SABOTAGE:

This is from many quarters – INEC staff, Politicians, ad-hoc staff, contractors, etc. We just got a recent case of forged PVCs in one of the States; the cards were tested and found to be fake.

CHALLENGES TO THE DEPLOYMENT OF ICT …5

In-house “infightings”: Brick walls by INEC staff Departments hitherto handling process feel you are

taking over their jobs Within the Commission itself – interests, etc

CONCLUSION People, Process & Technology – key to the success of

the development of ICT in the electoral process. INEC is trying to make sure that the people part of the

process gets the required training and knowledge transfer to own the processes. In fact all the implementation of IT infrastructures in the last five years have been carried out through indigenous and in-house IT personnel.

Processes have been well laid out, and loopholes have been identified. Eg ensuring that the SCRs are well uniquely tagged such that they can be adequately monitored pre and during the elections, and during post election data transfer to the voter authentication database.

Technologically, the Commission has imbibed great technologies through its processes, however some technologies and their architectural layouts are being re-engineered to achieve better output and service delivery.

WAY FORWARD

Hoping that necessary amendments to the Electoral Act will be achieved soon, so that the Commission can have all the legal backing to employ the full advantage of what technology offers.

Funds! Funds!! Funds!!! The success of IT deployment, especially as huge as what INEC requires need a lot of funds. We hope that our budgets will no longer be slashed so that we can maintain, solidify and consolidate on our recent achievements.

INEC’s mission is to serve as an independent and effective EMB committed to the conduct of free, fair and credible elections for sustainable democracy in Nigeria; this we are committed to achieving with ICT being a venerable tool.

Thank you for your

attention