LEADING TECH EXPERT, ADEWALE ADETUGBO FAULTS NBA UPCOMING ELECTIONS, SAYS IT IS BOUND TO BE FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED
Leading technology expert and Chief Technical Officer at Telnet Nigeria Limited, Adewale Adetugbo, has expressed his concerns over the technical loopholes in the proposed e-voting to be carried out by the Nigerian Bar Association in two days. In an article posted on his LinkedIn page, he highlighted the flaws in the NBA portal which has been mooted as the platform for conducting the elections. He spoke about the associated difficulties that come with conducting free and fair elections over the internet and made suggestions on how the NBA can ensure that the upcoming elections are free and fair. His writeup is reproduced below:
“Introduction
The NBA intends to conduct an election in the next few days. Unfortunately, this election is fundamentally flawed and not likely to represent the “will” of the NBA electorate. The process has several obvious problems that practically guarantee a contested outcome.
As a technologist, well aware of the challenges surrounding voting systems, I am particularly interested in the NBA elections which will be held online. I thought to myself, “Hmm they are trading anonymity and secret ballots for efficiency and convenience. Lets have a look”. What I found appalled me. I found a system that seemed expressly designed to allow the NBA assign votes to whomsoever it pleases.
This is deplorable, in the light of the criminal charges the Economic & Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is currently pursuing, that imply the last election was fraudulent. In July, the EFCC arraigned two individuals on a 14-point charge of fraudulently manipulating the election. They claim, 1004 votes were manipulated in favor of the final winner. There is nothing today that prevents this from occurring. In fact with the current process, a repeat is practically guaranteed.
The current NBA electoral process suffers from several integrity issues. Conducting “free and fair” elections over the Internet is an extremely difficult task. Several authorities hold that it is impossible, with today’s technology. Accepting that the NBA process does not allow for secret ballots (the NBA and others will always know who you voted for), it also does not even attempt to guarantee the “integrity” of the process. There are no guarantees that only those that are able to vote, will vote and that their votes would be accurately tallied without being changed by outsiders.
Integrity Issues
The NBA elections suffer from challenges in two areas, that compromise and condemn the entire process.
· Voter registration
· Lack of transparency in the voter process
Voter registration
Currently there is no way of ensuring the reliability of the NBA’s electoral roll. Typically, voter rolls are made available to participants in an election for review and challenge. This process ensures the integrity of the roll, with all the participants agreeing at the end of the process that the voters on the roll are eligible to vote.
The current NBA process is severely flawed. There are no attempts it seems to ensure all the voters on the roll actually exist and meet the criteria the NBA has defined, in a manner that is publicly verifiable. It is as a direct result of this flaw, that the alleged fraud in the previous national elections, being prosecuted by the EFCC, was possible. 25% of the winner’s total came from the manufactured 1004 votes.
I have included a link to the voters register below where you can compare the information provided with, say the INEC voters register. How can the public or candidates verify that the individuals on the list exist and are lawyers?
Lack of transparency.
Electoral processes generally have designed “checkpoints” of some sort, where outsiders and participants can verify key parts of the process. These checkpoints are the rituals familiar to the Nigerian voter, the accreditation process at the voting booth, the traditional display of an empty ballot box, the public counting of ballots, etc.
There are no such checkpoints in the NBA process. Rather the electoral committee of the NBA (ECNBA) conducts itself as an oracle. We are to “trust” its pronouncements regarding votes even though it provides no visibility into who voted for whom, when and from where.
This information is available to the ECNBA in real time as administrators and custodians of the election portal. Providing the information to candidates, their reps and the public would be an easy way to build trust and bring auditability to the process. This is not being done.
Conclusion
In the course of writing this, I came across several instances where lawyers have complained of errors in the electoral roll, issues in registration, verification and also shared concerns regarding the integrity of the process. I have not seen any public response by the ECNBA to these issues. It almost seems as if the system is working as designed.
This election, if it is not postponed and changes made to the current system, is guaranteed to disenfranchise lawyers. However, maybe they expect to be disenfranchised. Maybe this is a feature and not a bug.
Adewale Adetugbo is the Chief Technical Officer at Telnet Nigeria Limited. He is a leader in the technology space in Nigeria, with 15 years’ experience in the sector, spanning strategy, product and service development, enterprise networking, systems integration, enterprise software/servers/platforms, and telecommunications service provision, network design, systems design and architecture.
