ICTworks by Inveneo

Nigerians are excited for the presidential election on April 9th. It is shaping up to be an interesting race, with the current president even announcing his candidacy on Facebook.

They are also excited to register to vote using 132,000 direct data capture (DDC) machines - an electronic voter registration process by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that's new to Nigeria. But just as registrations are getting started, reported of technology problems are starting to come in.

Voter Registration Issues

The Canadian Press reports there are basic registration issues:

At a school on Lagos' Ikoyi Island, officials argued with each other at a distribution point hours after volunteers should have staffed their locations. When workers finally opened the metal cases containing their laptops, printers and extra batteries, they discovered the electronic equipment hadn't been charged, in a country where electricity remains scarce.

Then Possicon details the power issue and the problems it presents:

Once election officials sorted out the power issues and found the right passwords, they ran into technology problems with the thumbprint scanner, which is supposed to ensure there is one vote per person.

Abdul-Hakeem Ajijola reports that the Zinox USB Finger Print Reader is not working, because the computer is not loading its hardware driver. Possicon says this is true at Adeye, Rashidi Oyekan and Adenola streets in Ketu, Lagos.

Preparation, Not Technology

Looking at these issues, the root cause is clear, a lack of preparation. The members of Nigeria's National Youth Service Corps, who are staffing the registration points, should have tested their registration equipment and the process at each location before the opening day of voter registrations.

Voter Registration Card with wrong gender

This is a basic rule of any technology deployment: test, test, test before you go live. Do practice runs of the technology itself (laptop, scanner, printer, etc), then test the process by running it with sample fake data, then test it on a real voter, then test it on a group of voters, all long before you actually open the registration station.

If the National Youth Service Corps staffers had done this even the day before the voter registration process started, there would not be so many issues happening on the first morning.

Still, there isn't an issue everywhere. Akinzo says that once the glitches are worked out, electronic voter registration is a seamless process in Shomolu. The average time to register voters dropped to less than 10 minutes per person, which is impressive considering the lack of preparation.

What's Next?

Now Bisii brings up a good question about all the Zinox laptops, fingerprint readers, and printers: What happens to INEC's equipment after this year's election?

I would suggest that the 132,000 computers (with at least 80,000 Zinox laptops), go to needy Nigeria university students. Let them buy the laptops through a state subsidy, like Kenya's Wesesha program. This would jump start Nigeria's ICT future better than free .ng domain names.

Raila Odinga registering to vote in 4 minutes flat

Regardless of their political affiliations, ICT firms should be pushing electronic voter registration and voting in every country of Africa. Why? Not only does it increase participation in the elections process, and make it more transparent, it also makes great business sense.

Here's an example from Business Daily Africa: the Kenyan constitutional referendum earned several suppliers of technology goods and Internet services millions of shillings when the Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC) used electronic registration and voting in 18 constituencies.

Nokia, the largest handset manufacturer, supplied IIEC with 18,000 mid-tier mobiles worth Sh38 million, according to documents seen by Business Daily. Listed telecom firm Safaricom provided 100 megabytes (MB) of data for each of the mobiles, earning it over Sh2 million in the two-day process.

Apart from handsets, the IIEC staff used laptops and other peripheral devices to conduct voter registration, voting, and tallying of results. The electoral body has said it plans to spend about Sh32 billion in a step by step process to build the infrastructure that would see Kenyans vote electronically in 20,000 polling centres around the country by 2012.

Now that's a political change I think every ICT company can vote for!