1.0 INTRODUTION
Today the Internet has been a fair concept that has profoundly affected our daily lives. As with anything new the internet possesses various mysteries. The advancement made in technology over the past few years is astounding. The computer alone has progressed at a remarkable pace, and updates are continually occurring. Online voting system opens the door to all sorts of possibilities for our state (country) voting future. One basic feature of democracy that cuts across all kinds of people is the act of election. Democracy thus encourages individual freedom according to the rule of law, so that people may behave and express themselves as they choose their leader. This not only gives people a chance to choose their leaders, but also to freely express their views on issues.
Alvarez R.M, Hall, T.E and Trechsel, A.H. Thus, voting is a method by which group of people make decisions. These decisions could be political, social or public. Voting is also a means of selecting or choosing leaders, it does not apply only to local government, states and federal government of Nigeria but also in different institutions and social organization.
For democracy to be sound, it should be free and fair.
Over the years, the voting system in Nigeria has been put under a manual system of operation which mostly results to inaccuracy and ineffective election.
It is gradually being realized that much faster accurate, effective and efficient system is needed to be adopted. Here, on-line system is to be adopted to handle voting.
This on-line voting system ensures that each intended voter is checked whether he/she is registered or not, if he/she is not registered, the system refuses him voting. Also it checks whether he/she has voted for that particular election. This on-line voting system prevents a situation where a particular candidate seizes the voters’ cards, and uses them to vote for himself. Hence the rigging associated with the manual voting systems has been completely handled. The system also takes care of result calculation of each candidate in particular election and the percentage scored in that election. This eliminates rigging associated with the calculation and counting of votes.
A means of showing the various outputs is also adopted by the system, the output can either be displayed on the screen or a hard copy of it can be produced depending on the choice of the user. This prevents intentional and unintentional typographical errors in showing the results of the elections.
With an on-line voting, voters can only cast once; it will also afford people who are sick and unable to go to polling stations to cast their vote.
The following are the statements of problem:
1 This system will prevent disenfranchising eligible voters
1.2 AIM AND OBJECTIVES
The main objective of this study is to develop an online voting system and which will be able to achieve the following:
1.3 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM