By Adekunle Adekoya
ASABA — The nation’s leading computer whiz-kids and ICT experts continued brainstorming, yesterday, on ICT solutions to the nation’s electoral system which had been bedevilled in the past by many woes as the annual conference of the Nigerian Computer Society holding in Asaba enters the third day.

At the plenary session which held yesterday morning, presided over by Professor Adenike Osofisan, the computer gurus proffered solutions for e-voting, tallying of the votes cast, and before that, solutions to voter identification using biometric data captures and other agent-based e-solutions.

The on-going national conference of the Nigerian Computer Society is the 23rd in the series, with the theme, Realising a Stable Democratic Political System in Nigeria: IT Tools & Strategies.

In a paper titled “A three-tier Access Control Mechanism for a Secured e-Voting, delivered by Mba Odim of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Redeemers University, Ogun State, the case was made for the security of the voting system to make it inviolable by external influence and assure fidelity of the exercise.

Odim in his paper posited that to make e-voting secure, “we need to input the biometrics of the voter. Some biological characteristics are unique, like fingerprints. We therefore adopted the fingerprint minutiae-based matching biometric in conjunction with voters’ ID and PIN in our approach to provide a more reliable access control framework to an e-voting system.”

But a discussant, Dr. Chris Uwaje, faulted Odim’s presentation, saying there may be problems with authentication of the the source of the biometrics already inputed.

His words: “My own problem is with the processes leading to the capture of biometric data for e-voting. There are problems of verification regarding birth data, death data, residential data, even land data. All these are data that must be captured and verified to ensure that the person who says he is, is really the person that is voting.”

Another discussant, Dr. Sola Aderounmu also faulted the entire concept of e-voting based on the nation’s infrastructural challenges.
“There are network problems. The network for e-voting must be robust enough. There are also bandwidth issues, as a result of which the network may be slow in some areas, in which case e-voting becomes problematic, or easy in areas where the bandwidth is sufficient.

There are also problems associated with voter identification, as exemplified by the National ID card problem,” he said.
In another paper presented by A.S. Sodiya of the Department of Computer Science, UNAAB, Abeokuta, titled: An Agent-based Framework for Secured e-Voting, solutions to some of the problems highlighted earlier were forwarded.

These involved the use of agents, which are different kinds of software dedicated to performance of specific tasks in the e-voting process.

Uwaje lauded the presentation, but cautioned that input data must be clear and unambiguous to make it function well, and used our immigration data form as example, and reiterated that whatever e-solutions we adopt, what is crucial is the processes of data capture.

Aderounmu concurred, but warned of security issues in using agents. He also advised that co-ordination of what the agents are doing is also important. The conference enters the fourth day today, and will end tomorrow.