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CHALLENGES OF ICT DEVELOPMENT
IN NIGERIA ELECTORAL PROCESS
Engr. Chidi Nwafor, FNSE
Director, ICT
18th November 2015
INTRODUCTION
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Introduction of ICT to its internal processes 
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setting up of LANs at the HQ and in all its 36 State offices and the FCT
INEC commenced real technological drive in 2002:
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Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology for Voter Registration.
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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.
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:
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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:
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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:
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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;
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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:
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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:
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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
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The LAW:
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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”.
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SCRs – misquote S.52(1b)
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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”.
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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.
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
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Political Class:
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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.
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Yet, the politicians are the group of people who look for loopholes, or even
create them, to make our processes non-credible.
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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.
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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
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CHANGE FACTOR:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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SABOTAGE:
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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
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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 inhouse 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