E-Voting and Electoral Credibility in Nigeria A Study of Anambra State 2021 Gubernatorial Election

Abstract

Electoral fraud and violence are slack to democracies all over the world. This is compounded by the fact that the conduct of free, fair and credible election is always faced with numerous challenges. In continuous search for conduct of credible elections, advanced and developing
democracies are shifting from manual conducts of election to electronic conducts. As a result, countries are increasingly deploying technologies in their elections. These have greatly helped to minimize electoral fraud and violence in such countries. The increasing reliance on E-voting among advanced and emerging democracies all over the world demonstrate that credible election is the backbone of democracy. In Nigeria however, manual voting since independence has totally failed. As a result of the inherent security and credibility challenges confronting successive elections in Nigeria, INEC from 2011 and most remarkably since 2015, tilted towards electronic voting. Since then, the electoral body has continued to make several attempts to ensure that e-voting is fully employed in the conduct of federal and state governments elections in the coming years. Evidence of this, is the introduction and deployment of Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) by INEC in the conduct of Anambra State 2021 gubernatorial election. This study therefore investigated how BVAS impacted on electoral credibility in the Anambra state election, employing data gathered from secondary sources. The study adopted the E-democracy framework in the analysis. The paper however argued that although BVAS encountered some challenges in the form of capacity gaps on the part of the operators and polling officials and secondly, tech-glitches, the device if properly modified will have the capacity of enhancing electoral credibility in future Anambra State elections.