M-Voting: A Panacea for Enhanced E-Participation

摘要

Majority of voting techniques have been employed over the years in elections. Each of these techniques had attendant short comings. The existing manual voting system has been subjected to gross abuse and irregularities. The electronic method, though highly promising is not completely free of irregularities. The mobile devices have been the most adopted means of communication both in the developed and the developing countries with its penetration more than all other electronic devices put together. Thus, it can be considered a good candidate for voting platform the world over. Therefore, this study investigates the prospects of M-voting as a panacea for enhanced participation and convenience of voters using Nigeria as a case study. This study equally considers the possibilities of integrating M-voting to the existing platforms for wider acceptability and patronage. We developed a prototype m-Voting system using WML (Wireless Markup Language) PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) with MySQL Server as the database server and tested using the mobile explorer emulator (Openwave V7 Simulator).