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TopIntroduction And Background
The importance of an election in a nation cannot be over-emphasized. The socio-political health of any nation is interwoven with a good electioneering process. Just as garbage in, garbage out in the computer, the quality of the electioneering process determines the quality of leadership that emanates from such election. One of the major problems of developing nations in the world today, and indeed Nigeria, is corruption (Goodnews et al., 2014; Omotimilehin, 2019). The immediate consequence of bad election is the emergence of corrupt leadership (Ogbewere & Dunmade, 2014). A member of the Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption, Prof. Femi Odekunle who is a former pioneer Director, United Nations African Institute for the Prevention of Crime, Kampala, Uganda said that the consequences of corruption for the nation continue to be devastating to the extent that they are 'killing' the polity economically, politically and socio-culturally thus resulting in unjustifiable under-development and opined that the emergence of desirable leadership would help in fighting the corruption. The elections that have been producing successive leaders in Nigeria are mostly flawed and rigged. This necessitates the introduction of card reader technology by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to provide means of conducting free and fear election in Nigerian (Yomi, February 20, 2019). The card reader is essentially a hardware device used to verify and authenticate fingerprint of eligible voters to reduce incidences of rigging. INEC used the card reader to verify and authenticate fingerprints of voters Adigun (2019) dwells on ways elections are rigged in Nigeria.
This work seeks to improve the voting system in Nigeria by using the concept of fuzzy logic, described in James (1993), and biometrics to develop a sound mathematical model that support the underlining architectural construction. The developed architecture derives its strength from multimodal integration of fingerprints and Iris to compensation for any failure encountered in the current unimodal approach in use by INEC. This ensures that the loopholes encountered in the present unimodal verification and authentication of voters using fingerprint alone is augmented by an additional layer of Iris recognition in the event of failure.
Statement of the Problem
The process of choosing candidates for leadership positions in Nigeria has always been problematic. Elections into the leadership positions are, most of the times, marred with frauds (Kia, 2013) and thereby successively producing crops of bad leadership (Anthony & Nusret, 2015). Hence, the nation is enmeshed in crisis in many spheres of her endeavours ranging from daring and monumental corruption, institutional failures, terrorism et cetera. These entire problems can be traced to the flawed process of producing occupants of the leadership positions. Ill-conducted elections result in bad leadership. The major attempt at solving this problem was the employment of card readers which has also become problematic as a result of false negative and false positive in voter verification and authentication. Since the elections are that produce the leaders are always flawed, getting to the root of solving the nation's problem, therefore, entails sanitizing her electoral process. One of the ways to do this is by removing the false negative and false positive in voter’s verification and authentication process.
Purpose of the Research
This work is meant to solve the problems associated with false negative and false positive in voter verification and authentication during the Nigeria election and to provide an alternative paradigm to improve voter verification and authentication.
Scope and Limitation of the Research
The data used in this research is for a particular senatorial district but it adequately represents the trend of things across the country. Also, 2015 data was used as all the litigations arising from the elections of 2015 have been resolved thereby avoiding contempt of court for the recent election whose cases are still pending in courts.