Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) - Arts & Humanities Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Introduction
Many Nigerian and other African countries are currently experiencing a widespread fall in voter turnout in national elections. The most recent Nigerian election, held in February 2019, turned out to be the lowest voter participation in history since the country's return to democracy in 1999, with 34.75 percent voting (ICIR, 2019). Journalists, analysts, commentators, politicians, and even ordinary citizens have discussed this scenario. A report by the ICIR (International Center for Investigative Reporting) listed some factors that could be responsible for the poor turnout of the presidential election, part of which are insecurity and apathy (ICIR, 2019), as well as electoral violence (Lebas, 2006) and (Wilkison, 2004), but it is the consequences that motivate policymakers to take the next step and build a new model capable of dealing with the new circumstances that modern society is experiencing and expressing its vision or feelings through the act of not voting and not showing up at the polls. One of the challenges that democracies have been dealing with is this. Nigeria is not an exception, and it is the focus of this study.
According to data compiled by the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), an intergovernmental organization that promotes global democracy, voter turnout in the recently concluded presidential election was the second lowest in the history of African elections, with the lowest being 32.3 percent in the 1996 Zimbabwean presidential election (IDEA, 2020). Recent elections worldwide have seen a gradual decline in the overall percentage of the electorate exercising their right to vote (Qadah, 2005). These findings raise concerns about political power's long-term viability. One of the key issues, however, should not be overlooked: the difficulty of voting due to a lack of proper polling stations and great distances to travel in order to vote. This may no longer be an explanatory variable for the output, especially in the near future.
Another aspect to consider for the low turnout performance is the problem of credibility between people and institutions as a result of lack of transparency, alteration of results during the process (Animashaun, 2010). Elections based on secure technology, particularly the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), will go a long way toward preventing some of these electoral crimes. Now is the time to meet a technical institution that has a high degree of enforcement, is efficient, and capable of providing a solution to the credibility issues just described.
The principles of e-voting and e-government will be introduced and discussed in this paper, as well as analyzed and some real-world instances. This allows one to conceptualize and contextualize the most recent advancements in the application of technology in this area. However, some elements of the process are visible in the electoral system, such as biometric registration and accreditation, smart card readers for verification, a result viewing portal, electronic voting machines (EVMs), and real-time online transmission of voting results directly from voting machines, so it would be inaccurate to say that e-voting is new to the electorate. They have, however, only been utilized on a small scale — in local government and gubernatorial elections (Techpoint, 2018).
Furthermore, in the case of e-voting, a small number of European countries, including Estonia, UK, France, Switzerland, and Germany, have deployed electronic voting equipment in some form or another, with varying degrees of success or failure (Agbesi, 2020). Estonia is still using it and was the first country to pass an E-voting law. However, it is worth noting that the majority of countries have put the official deployment of this mechanism in elections on hold, citing the risk of electronic system hacking, concerns with election results certification, and the possibility of software errors and African countries are not left out in this opinion as they also face similar challenges to adopt such technology (Balise, 2019). The lack of trust in this system, as well as the concern of making it constitutional, has slowed progress.
However, (Wiseman, 2017), contends that the significant benefits of internet voting to the electoral process exceed the security flaws uncovered. And to further address the confidence dilemma on one hand and the stress voters go through on the other, a more complex, cryptographic, and revolutionary technique may be used to shift the paradigm. It is possible to investigate and develop a more powerful technology with a practical application such as Blockchain technology which can be used to create a decentralized, and more trustworthy voting system.
In the near future, blockchain technology could be the answer in solving voting result irregularities. It all started with Bitcoin, and over the last several years, a broad range of potential uses has emerged and “E-voting is among the key public sectors that can be disrupted by blockchain technology”

There is a lot of trust issues in the Nigerian electoral system, When a stakeholder believes that one of the other stakeholders is acting outside of the established rules or constitutional boundaries governing elections, trust can be broken. Some examples can be found in developing countries such as Kenya, Malawi (Md & Rawnak, 2018; Roberts, 2012; Taylor, 2018). And either pre or post-election violence could all emerge from such a violation of trust. To address voter tampering, blockchains generate cryptographically secure voting records. Votes are recorded accurately, permanently, securely, and transparently (Prisco as cited in Kshetri and Voas, 2018). So it makes it hard for people to modify or manipulate votes (Leary as cited in Kshetri and Voas, 2018). The list of records (also known as a distributed ledger) is decentralized and open to the public and double-check Blockchain goes beyond the Internet as we know it today. It is capable of solving the problem of a single, and only one, unique identifier, making its implementation in the voting system particularly relevant. Last but not least, decentralization increases the speed with which data is processed, allowing the results to be viewable across a country, notwithstanding the likelihood of each local government areas having its own results operate with its own load-distribution mechanism. Concluding, one may use the literature review as a contribution for the research development and, in the end, be able to add knowledge to the existing work by making a purpose of the use of this technology in the Nigerian Voting System.
Whilst part of the analysis/discussion provided in this section are relevant, the section is incoherent articulated and presented.
This is a background section and needs to identify the need for the research and how the proposed approach can be best used in the context under study. Also, the last paragraph above, should attempt to apply the implementation of blockchain technology to the Nigeria context, by provide examples of possible ways.

Aims and Objectives
The major goal of this research is to see how Blockchain Enabled voting system (BEVS) might be used to improve the current Nigerian voting system and so doing increase voters participation.
To argue for and justify its use, one must research existing E-voting systems and projects, as well as the interactivity of Blockchain technology and the current electoral system in Nigeria and gather information on potential initiatives to execute. In some online voting system Blockchain technological solutions were implemented, and they were successful. To summarize, it is critical to comprehend the potential benefits of a Blockchain-enabled voting system in Nigeria as a solution to the issue of violence, and lack of credibility. It is important to learn how on a secondary level the use would have an effect on the rate of participation in the Nigerian electoral system.
Ideally, chapter one has several sections, which could include problem statement, research rationale, dissertation structure, chapter summary. Please consider getting hold of a decent dissertation to use as sample.

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