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SIGH! Nigeria’s Failed Electoral System And The Only Solution -By Roy Biakpara

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Prof. Yakubu INEC

The title of the article is SIGH, because I feel there is a whole lot more to say. Compounding my frustration is the fact that it started months ago, delayed more by patriotic hope than realistic occasions. Releasing it just days to Nigeria’s election still is not my will but the urging of friends and family. Many before have made similar expressions on the topic, many more will after me and in there lies the tragedy. I fervently hope there is CHANGE to come.

Introduction

A number of attempts via articles, research and studies have been made on this very pertinent topic. Varied conclusions abound and this article is not to add to the confusion or discard any of the effort made before now. My aim is to look at it from neither a scholarly nor political perspective. I am simply a student of security. One that assures lives and property. The symptoms of the past are replaying like the relapse of a malaise with nature and mother-time as its only cure. The journey to the infirmary, over the malaise, is neither too far nor very close — it is within. Honesty within us to see the problem and call it for what it is and deliberately seeking to heal because of the value of life, any life.

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The Giant of…

Good growth performance in spurts over the last 30 years and between 2010 and 2014, the Nigerian economy grew at an average rate of 6% each year, leading to an aspiration for Nigeria to become an advanced economy by 2020 [https://tradingeconomics.com/nigeria/gdp-growth]. The economy contracted and eventually spiralled into a recession by 2016.

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Prof. Yakubu of INEC

There are so many challenges to get the country back on track, but it I believe it starts with getting the right people in leadership positions by having free, fair and credible elections. Beyond educating the citizens of Nigeria to look at tasking politicians rather than trusting them, the foundation for honest governance devoid of sectional bias is fundamental.

Security is indispensable to the conduct of free, fair, and credible elections. From the provision of basic everyday security, to voters at political party rallies and campaigns, unto ensuring that result forms are protected — the whole electoral process is circumscribed by security considerations.

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In has been more in hope than reality that significant progress would have been made over several years in the evolution of elections in Nigeria. The reality is that the process has suffered from a deluge of mistakes, lack of knowledge management for continuity and theories that may be more confusing in practice than directional.

It has become clearer that confidence in the universal validity of democracies as practised in countries like the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA) does not fit into the Nigerian narrative. Unfortunately, the likely form best-suited to our peculiar entity that may have evolved independent of colonialism, is now open to conjecture rather than concrete transposition.

Elections and indeed democracy in Nigeria today are largely ‘borrowed’. But even at that, we have mixed it with parts of our culture that make it seem like trying to mix water and oil. What is certain though, is that wherever elections are held, the integrity of the results, are vital to peace and equity. It should also totally be the representation of the people’s will — which is what democracy is about.

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Below are some of the headlines related to past, current and ‘future’ conduct of elections:

Nigeria’s electoral commission has suspended the announcement of results from election reruns in the oil-producing Rivers state after deadly violence broke out around the polls. — https://www.newsweek.com/nigeria-rivers-state-rerun-election-results-suspended-after-deadly-violence-438887

Re-run elections: Rivers govt bribed 23 polls officials with N360m — Police — https://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/02/re-run-elections-rivers-govt-bribed-23-polls-officials-n360m-police/

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The Risks of Violence in Nigeria’s 2019 Elections — https://www.usip.org/publications/2018/09/risks-violence-nigerias-2019-elections

Special mention (El-Rufai, Governor of Kaduna State): “Those that are calling for anyone to come and intervene in Nigeria, we are waiting for the person to come and intervene. They would go back in body bags because nobody would come to Nigeria and tell us how to run our country,” he said. While the Presidency defended his comments, INEC has, however, distanced itself from the controversial statement. Read more: https://www.legit.ng/1220478-inec-reacts-el-rufais-death-threat-foreigners-elections.html

The Houses of Senate and Representatives passed the Electoral (Amendment) Bill 2018 which failed to receive presidential assent.

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“Domestic and international observers have expressed concern about electoral fraud, after allegations of vote-buying at recent gubernatorial elections. One of the main amendments in the bill was the compulsory use of electronic voter card readers, which are designed to make it harder to rig the result. Failure of the technology would see a substitute machine brought in to the affected polling station and voting postponed up to 24 hours, the bill proposed.

Under the current legislation, card readers that scan fingerprints and other personal data are optional. Election officials can revert to traditional paper ballots and electoral lists should the technology fail. That happened in 2015 when then-president Goodluck Jonathan voted in his hometown, forcing him to register by hand. Buhari had no such problems when he voted. Technical glitches with the handheld readers at 300 of the country’s 150,000 polling stations forced the election to run over into a second day.” — https://www.independent.co.ug/nigerias-president-blocks-electoral-reform-bill/

You may have heard, originally billed to hold today February 16th, now the elections will hold on February 23rd. “Following a careful review of the implementation of it’s logistics and operational plan…” we are always in review mode, not preview and proper planning and execution mode. Yet everyone keeps their jobs failure after failure.

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The President had refused three earlier versions of the Electoral Bill and failed to present his own version for deliberation it is claimed. It was hoped that issues such as outlined above would not arise if the Bill had been accepted to pass.

Solutions

Remote Voting Schemes

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The concept of remote electronic voting (e-voting) utilises the internet and smartphones for a period prior to polling day.

So many voting schemes require voters to cast their votes in the voting booth. However, this is not convenient for voters who are not able to attend the voting booth on election day. To solve this issue, several verifiable remote voting schemes have been introduced. For example, remote voting allows people living in different places outside the country such as soldiers and diplomats to participate in elections easily by voting online. [Huian Li, Abhishek Reddy Kankanala, Xukai Zou — A Taxonomy and Comparison of Remote Voting Schemes].

Estonia’s example

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Estonia led the way by introducing remote voting in the form they call i-voting which stands for Internet Voting, for all political elections in 2005. i-voting, is a system that allows voters to cast their ballots from any internet-connected computer anywhere in the world. They attempt to differentiate their system to the electronic voting systems used elsewhere, proclaiming their solution as simple, elegant and secure.

The voter’s identity is removed from the ballot before it reaches the National Electoral Commission for counting, thereby ensuring anonymity. Estonia’s solution allows voters to log on and vote as many times as they want during a pre-voting period. Since each vote cancels the last, a voter has the option of changing his or her vote later.

When security experts voiced concerns about the integrity of votes, following an ‘examination’ of the system, the Estonian Information System Authority responded to the claims, describing them as a political, rather than technical, attack on the e-voting system, and criticised the method of disclosure.

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The case of Estonia is especially enlightening: although the country’s infrastructure for digital democracy is highly developed, use of the Internet has been at times massively disrupted by denial-of-service attacks. Forcing the country to maintain its traditional voting infrastructure alongside the I-voting option. [Encyclopaedia Britannica — Electronic Voting].

The case for e-voting

In view of security and access concerns, electronic voting is right now held in assigned locations utilising specially built machines.

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As alluded to in sections above, security is a major issue in elections in Nigeria, indeed as in many other countries. Lessons from preceding exercises, to ensure failures, errors and other negative occurrences are not captured unto successive ones. Not delving into the humanitarian aspect of it, the responsibility of lives lies with any incumbent administration. In that, they (past and present administrations) have all fallen short in one way or another.

But the President has just announced that “ballot box snatchers” and “political thugs”, risk their lives by carrying out either activity. Only within the same week, there was a case of a customs officer who was alleged to have shot an innocent man. The accusation was he had been refused a N5000 bribe. There are cases of more established and brazen abuse of power and a statement as made by the President, is suspiciously viewed. This is especially so when the Anti-corruption fight has been viewed and utterly lopsided. Governor Ganduje vs ex-Governor Fayose as prime examples. The party chairman, Oshiomole has even publicly bragged about those joining APC being forgiven of all sins.

Despite concerns about and there were intelligence reports, within the last elections, of attempts to hack some states’ registration rolls, there is no evidence any voters were removed from rolls or any votes cast on electronic machines were tampered with.

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The Nigeria elections regulatory body, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had contemplated exploring e‐elections but later dropped the idea on grounds of unpreparedness. [Folarin, S. F. and Ayo, C. K. and Oni, Aderonke A and Gberevbie, D.E. (2014) Challenges and Prospects of e‐Elections in Nigeria. In: 14th European Conference on eGovernment, 12–13 June 2014, Braşov, Romania.]

Thea Peacock, Peter Y.A. Ryan, Steve Schneider and Zhe Xia (University of Luxemburg, Coudenhove-Kalergi, Luxembourg; University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom) in their paper, Verifiable Voting System, introduced a particular approach to addressing the challenge of demonstrating trustworthiness, around the key idea of end-to-end verifiability.

I have re-presented that approach here with regards to fulfilling security in the Nigerian context.

Security Requirements on Electronic Voting Systems

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1. Ballot secrecy: Only the voter should know how he/she voted. The idea is that it runs on physically and systemically separated voting systems. Hence, the electoral roll is separated from vote casting and the ballot box. Only the confirmation that a voter has voted is available to be viewed — it is impossible to determine how a person voted. This ensures that electoral principles of no-coercion are adhered to.

2. Legitimacy: Only registered voters may vote. The mechanisms aim to ensure that only legitimate voters can cast a vote, and it is the registered voter who is actually casting the vote.

3. Eligibility: A voter may vote at most once and all votes cast are genuine. The system ensures that voting does not allow the possibility for voters to cast and have counted multiple votes.

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4. Individual verification : The voter should be able to check that her vote is accurately recorded for tabulation. Voting results can be manipulated if there is lack of verification and validation. The interesting bit is that both voters and election auditors are able to check whether votes have been cast and counted accurately.

5. Universal verifiability: They are published on a bulletin board and verifiable by any third party. As in the point above, any other third party can confirm that the result is accurate. — https://www.computerworld.com/article/2528973/government-it/e-voting-system-lets-voters-verify-their-ballots-are-counted.html

6. Accuracy (integrity): The announced tally should reflect the true count of all legitimate, cast votes. Integrity is verified by using the public bulletin board, digital signatures, and mathematical proofs of the votes. Some have argued that accuracy is the ability to accurately capture voter intent, where the error rate is 1.5%. But point (4.) above already satisfies accuracy so accuracy is assured.

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7. Receipt-freeness: A voter should not be able to prove her vote. In a voting system with coercers and vote-buyers, a voting scheme must ensure that the voter should not be able to prove to a third party that he has cast a particular vote. Peter Y A Ryan, Peter B Rønne, and Vincenzo Iovino stated that he must neither obtain nor be able to construct a receipt proving the content of his/her vote (receipt-freeness). [Selene: Voting with Transparent Verifiability and Coercion-Mitigation].

8. Coercion resistance: The voting system is coercion-resistant if the voter can vote the way he/she wishes to, even while appearing to cooperate with a coercer. There have been repeated cases of violent efforts to influence the outcomes of elections through intimidation, coercion, oppression and suppression of members of the opposition parties — typically by deployment of state security forces https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/west-africa/nigeria/averting-violence-around-nigerias-2019-elections.

9. Robustness: The system is be able to deliver the correct result even in the event of certain, suitably defined, levels of failure of corruption. In essence, the system allows any voter who has had interrupted his/her voting process to resume it or restart it while the poll stands. In the specific case of Nigeria, where electric power supply is unpredictable, there will be a guarantee of an uncorrupted outcome even in the event of a power cut — a regular scene in Nigeria. [A ROBUST ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM — Rui Joaquim, André Zúquete, Paulo Ferreira].

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10. Availability: Users are be able to access all features of a fully functioning system during the election. It also ensures a) the system works properly as long as the poll stands and b) any voter can have access to it from the beginning to the end of the poll — in concert with the robustness characteristic.

Affirmation that the vote is recorded as cast depends on testing of the machine’s equipment and programming before the race and certainty that the product running amid the race is indistinguishable programming from the one tried before the decision.

Of particular interest in the context of the article is the 8th requirement. In Nigeria, where voters are typically not protected from thugs, coercers, and adversaries when they cast their votes. So indeed it is possible to have a remote voting scheme, that not only achieves end-to-end verifiability, but also provides very high-level coercion protection to the voters.

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The 2015 general election Improved Automated Fingerprints Identification System (AFIS) was introduced to identify enrolled fingerprints on the register used for 2011 election. For the first time, INEC adopted technology for accreditation of voters with the aid of a Smart Card Reader (SCR). The Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) replaced the Temporary Voter Card (TVC). According to its fact-sheet, quality, security, durability, and cost effectiveness were underlying factors in the production of the Permanent Voter Cards by INEC.

As recently as early January, INEC complained about the PVCs, “There is no state in the country where we have achieved 100 per cent distribution of PVC. The distribution of PVC is the biggest headache for us. We need the media to help us encourage the people to come and collect their PVCs. People are not coming forward to pick their PVCs. We have about eight million PVCs yet to be collected by Nigerians.”

According to the Vanguard Newspapers of February 7, 2019, “INEC has disclosed the possibility of extending the deadline for the collection of Permanent Voter Cards PVCs particularly in states which have a low collection rate. Read more at: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/02/inec-to-extend-pvc-collection-deadline-in-selected-states/

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Diaspora

“The Commission wishes to state unequivocally that there will be no Diaspora or Out-of-Country voting tor any Nigerian, in accordance with extant provisions of the Nigerian Constitution 1999 (as amended). Only duly registered Internally Displaced Persons (lDPs) within Nigeria will be allowed to vote.” [BY SAHARA REPORTERS, NEW YORK DEC. 13, 2018]

Some governments initially introduced postal voting as a way to facilitate overseas and absentee voter’s access to the electoral process. Only drawback being that, reliability issues that are part of postal voting have helped to introduce new remote voting channels based on electronic means. In the United States, electronic voting channels based on fax, email, or Internet, are or have been used in binding elections. [Puiggalí, Jordi & Morales Rocha, Victor. (2007). Remote Voting Schemes: A Comparative Analysis. 4896. 16–28. 10.1007/978–3–540–77493–8_2.]

Summary

The concern of security professionals possibly would be that when the software is being built, modified and malicious code could be introduced without being detected with devastating impact potentially in the final product/system. The likelihood of that happening is remote, and by and large, dependent on the commitment or lack of it, of obtaining a robust system utilising a thoroughly screened team of developers or security-assured vendors. Satisfying the listed security requirements is thus, achievable.

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No PVC? No problem. Cannot be at location? No problem. These are just bonuses to the original benefits.

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