THE NEW VOTING SYSTEM

 

The voting system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums are conducted and how their results are determined. The new voting system is known as Electronic voting (E-voting).

The electronic voting system (E-voting) is an electoral process that uses electronic means to enable the casting of ballots, counting of ballots, and transmission of the election results from the polling centers to the central office of the electoral management body.

Depending on the particular implementation, e-voting may use standalone electronic voting machines ( EVM) or computers connected to the Internet. It may encompass a range of Internet services, from the transmission of tabulated results to full-function online voting through common connectable household devices. The degree of automation may be limited to marking a paper ballot or maybe a comprehensive system of vote input, vote recording, data encryption and transmission to servers, and consolidation and tabulation of election results.

A worthy e-voting system must perform most of these tasks while complying with a set of standards established by regulatory bodies, and must also be capable to deal successfully with strong requirements associated with security, accuracy, integrity, swiftness, privacy, audit ability, accessibility, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and ecological sustainability.

Electronic voting technology can include punched cards, optical scan voting systems, and specialized voting kiosks (including self-contained direct-recording electronic voting systems, or DRE).

TYPES OF E-VOTING SYSTEMS

Electronic voting systems

Electronic voting systems for electorates have been in use since the 1960s when punched card systems debuted. Their first widespread use was in the USA where 7 counties switched to this method for the 1964 presidential election. The newer optical scan voting systems allow a computer to count a voter's mark on a ballot. DRE voting machines which collect and tabulate votes in a single machine are used by all voters in all elections in Brazil and India, and also on a large scale in Venezuela and the United States. It is supervised by the representatives of the governmental or independent electoral authorities

Internet voting systems

Internet voting systems have gained popularity and have been used for government elections and referendums in Estonia, and Switzerland, as well as municipal elections in Canada and party primary elections in the United States and France.  Internet voting has also been widely used in sub-national participatory budgeting processes, including in Brazil, France, the United States, Portugal, and Spain. It is a platform where the voters or vote electronically to the election authorities from any location.

The Paper-based electronic voting system

A paper on “remote electronic voting and turnout in the Estonian 2007 parliamentary elections” showed that rather than eliminating inequalities, e-voting might have enhanced the digital divide between higher and lower socioeconomic classes. People who lived greater distances from polling areas voted at higher levels with this service now available

Benefits

Electronic voting technology intends to speed the counting of ballots, reduce the cost of paying staff to count votes manually, and can provide improved accessibility for disabled voters. Voters save time and cost by being able to vote independently from their location

Concerns

It has been demonstrated that as voting systems become more complex and include software, different methods of election fraud become possible. The use of electronic voting in elections remains a contentious issue.

NAME: ENOH, JOSEPH UMOH

STATE CODE: OS/22B/0199

COURSE: COMPUTER SCIENCE

INSTITUTION: HERITAGE POLYTECHNIC, EKET

STATE OF ORIGIN: AKWA IBOM STATE