ELECTRONIC VOTING AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR FREE, FAIR AND CREDIBLE ELECTIONS IN NIGERIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES

Electoral management is one of the recurrent discussions in emerging democracies across the globe. Issues of electoral fraud are most times predicated on the nature of electoral management since most elections in the affected countries are done manually. Improving on the electoral management has therefore become a focus of concern that the Nigerian state also aligned itself with in order to better its course of the democratic enterprise. Automation of electoral processes from the manual practice is primarily to address noticeable negativities associated with the manual system. This paper is an explanatory one that seeks to analyze the incentives, setbacks and challenges of the electronic voting system. The paper utilized secondary sources through careful analysis of literature on the subject matter in addition to personal observations and discussions among intellectual colleagues. The incentives of E-voting include but are not limited to reduction of electoral fraud, delays, manipulations of results and other irregularities including cost. The paper also maintains that the e-voting system has its own drawbacks in the forms of IT logistics, infrastructure, lack of trust, issues of transparency among other challenges. It concludes that there should be a pilot test at the micro level for an experiment before adopting on a large-scale national election, networking of government agencies to be fully IT compliant, inter alia. Article visualizations