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The fundamental human right of expression or choice of individual on who governs a democratic society is vital to every government. Everyone in a democratic society at an acceptable age has constitutional freedom to elect a contestant among several contestants into an office for governance, management, leadership and other oversight functions. An election is an organised technique with specified rules and regulations to elect a contestant by electorates into a political office or position. Furthermore, a voting system or electoral system is a collection of specified rules that describe how a typical election is conducted and how the final result of the election is recorded, collated, counted, and announced. A typical voting system has specific modules for a specific function. These modules may include voters' enrolment, authentication, voting, and results.
The major voting systems could be classified into Mechanical Lever, Paper-Based and Electronic voting system. Olowookere and Awode (2014) highlighted Paper-based Voting Systems (PVS), Central count voting systems (CCVS), Precinct count voting systems (PCVS) and Direct-recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems. However, electronic voting could further be classified into Short Message Service (SMS), Web-Based Voting (WBV) or Internet Voting System (IVS), Telephone Voting System (TVS) and Biometric-based Voting System (BVS).
Electronic voting is an election system that allows a voter to record his or her vote electronically. Electronic voting (e-voting) system is the type of voting that integrates electronic devices such as computers, mobile phones, fingerprint scanners, digital cameras and printers to the voting system. Electronic voting uses computer technology to conduct elections. With the advent of computer technology, the challenges recorded in the traditional of paper-based could be solved with the adoption of a secured e-voting system (Kumar & Begum, 2012).
There are functional and security requirements of the electronic voting systems. The functional requirements deal with descriptions and functions of the e-voting system while security requirements cover measures to safeguard the election data and tools of the e-voting system against unlawful acts. The functional requirements included mobility, flexibility, verification, convenience, transparency, uniqueness, cost-effectiveness, accuracy, auditability, and so on. The security requirements included reliability, system disclosability, availability, voter authentication, data integrity, data confidentiality, data secrecy.
The common voting system was PVS which had been characterized by problems such as rigging, voter's impersonation, double counting and so on. The term impersonation simply means an unlawful person claiming the identities of a lawful person. In recent times, false voters had been unlawfully permitted to poll unlawful vote. This was possible with the consent of election officers. This implied that fake voters could be granted permission to poll vote illegally when no adequate security measures were in place.
In an attempt to solve the problem of voter's impersonation, biometric technology was introduced into the voting system. Biometric technology is the digital measurement and recognition of physiological and behavioural characteristics of an individual. Biometric is the measurement of an individual based on the physiological and behavioural characteristics (Sushma, Sarita & Rakesh, 2011). The biometric physiological and behavioural include the face, iris, fingerprint, ear, nose, voice, palm, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and so on.
The term authentication simply means the assertion of the genuineness of something or individual. Authentication is a security terminology that describes the status of something or individual to be either true or false. In a biometric-based authentication system, a system could be implemented for either identification or verification. The term identification is a process of comparing a presented biometric to all the biometrics saved in the database (1 to Many) while verification is a process of comparing a presented biometric to a specific biometric saved in the database (1 to 1).
There are three basic types of data that could be used for authentication. These include:
Type 1: Something You Have (SYH), for example, smart cards, token devices, USB drives, etc.
Type 2: Something You Know (SYK), for example, PINs, Passwords, secret codes, etc.
Type 3: Something You Are (SYA), for example, fingerprint, iris, face, etc.