CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the study

The Federal Republic of Nigeria has 36 states, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and 774 Local Government Areas (LGA). The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in the north. The three main ethnic groups in Nigeria are the ethnic Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba.

In Nigeria, the general elections are held every four years, when a head of state and representatives of the President of the National Assembly are elected. They are elected by the people. The National Assembly has 360 members representing various groups.

Most African electoral bodies without exception to the CENI, even with advances in technology, still use primitive methods based paper during voting; this system is characterized by manual filling of forms to choose leaders and information transfer data entry forms for computerized manuals data sheets, which led to a high number of errors make their way in the final count of the votes. The main advantage of the paper-based system is the ballots are easily verifiable human. The disadvantages outweigh the advantages, for example, printing of ballots is slow, expensive, rigid, hostile environment and also limits Literacy and last minute changes to the voter register are difficult to accommodate, among others. In recent years, some observers have suggested the introduction of electronic voting at the state and federal. The online voting system is basically the voting phase. Electronic voting process using the online voting system should be cheaper than the current paper-based system was used by the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI). Online voting is an electronic way to choose leaders via an application-oriented web. The advantage of online voting on the present manual system is that voters can choose to vote in their own free time and reduce congestion. It also minimizes on counting errors. Individual votes are presented in a database that can be queried to find out who the candidates for a given position has the largest number of votes.

With online voting system, a voter can use his / her right to vote online, without any difficulty. He / she must register as a voter first before being allowed to vote. Registration must be done before the election date to allow updating of data on the database.