Revisiting the use of card reader in the 2015 elections (2)

Every process in the entire electoral system must be accepted by the people and be transparent in its operations. If any piece of technology will substitute the role of citizens in the verification stage, then such must be subjected to rigorous and robust scrutiny by all stakeholders. You need time to pull this through; INEC didn’t give the citizens that time. The late demonstrations and last-minute voter registrations were grossly insufficient.

Also, pilot testing is an important approach to deploying large systems like this. Rather than deploying it in the fiercely contested nationwide election, it should have been test-run in smaller elections, where the environment variables can be controlled, in line with global best practices. Supporting this view, E. A. Alebiosu, in a paper “Smart Card Reader and the 2015 Election in Nigeria”, argued: “Moving from manual process to infusing technology in voting process is a milestone that requires high efficiency. Between 2011 and 2015, INEC conducted Governorship Elections and bye-elections in some states of the federation. Why would INEC wait for 2015 general elections to use the card reader?”

INEC missed two clear opportunities to do that; the Ondo and Osun States gubernatorial elections were clear opportunities for a pilot test. Rather than do this, it was reported in Leadership of May 14, 2014 that the INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, said that “it will not be wise to use a pilot scheme in an election that will be keenly contested”.

If this statement above was correctly reported, one would want to find out from Jega if he had already foreclosed the main election as one that would not be “keenly contested”? Well, as it turned out, the election was “keenly contested”, and the card reader performed below expectations.

Those signs of failure started showing early, but again, maybe because we were too eager to show off our new-found technology, we ignored them. You may recall that INEC did a so-called mock election for field testing of the card reader, a process which was not altogether hitch-free. Curiously, while they announced a failure rate of 41 percent (fingerprint matching), they went on to say they were satisfied. How can you be satisfied with a machine that had a failure rate of about 41 percent in a critical biometric process? That error margin of 41 percent is an unacceptable tolerance margin for any sensitive public system such as this. In fact, one could argue that that is even a higher error margin than the manual accreditation process. As it turned out on election day, the card readers did fail en masse. The number one citizen of the country was left standing for over half an hour, as they rallied to replace one faulty card reader after another in the full glare of the viewing public and international reporters. This alone could have constituted sufficient grounds to discredit the elections and give room for the former president to challenge the outcome of the last elections; credit to him, he didn’t, and that laid the foundation for the peaceful transition that ensued.

As an aside, what happened to the INEC team that supervised the contracting arrangement for this device? What warranty arrangement was in place? Did they insist on getting free replacement for the 41 percent that failed the fingerprint test? When you spend billions for devices like this, you should not accept 41 percent failure rate in any aspect of it.

Finally, one would have thought we would learn from the mistakes of our African brother, Kenya. The case of Kenya was a classic example of a disastrous outing for technology; and that’s not because technology is bad, but because the authorities never did what they ought to have done. Hastily deploying technology, out of excitement, without doing your home work is a recipe for disaster. Taha Ali in his article, “How (not) to Deploy an Electronic Voting System”, summarized the Kenyan e-voting disaster thus: “In several instances, fingerprint scanners refused to identify legitimate voters. Election staff forgot PIN numbers and passwords to access the EVMs. Several polling stations did not have electric sockets and batteries started to die out. When the technology failed, several polling centres reverted to back-up paper ballots (which ended up delaying the announcement of election results by a week). A single server, meant to collect results from 33,400 polling stations via SMS, collapsed under the strain.”

Going forward, looking at things from a broader and professional perspective, it is imperative that the Ministry of Communications Technology should champion a process that will evolve a well-articulated e-Government Policy that clearly outlines the guidelines in deploying public-centric systems such as this, to ensure the integrity of the system and protect the interest of the citizenry. This can be mainstreamed and given legislative backing to serve as a standard guide for deploying public systems such as this. An important lesson should be learnt here: no matter how well-intentioned the technology is, with poor planning and implementation, it becomes a recipe for disaster; it was a miracle that total disaster was averted in our case. In deploying public-centric systems and technology, it is important to get it right. Get it right we must if we seek to make progress.

Let me end with this quote by Mourtada Deme, project director of the DGD Project of the UNDP: “For ICT to play its role faithfully and effectively, all technology in elections should serve to enhance the critical principles of accuracy, accessibility, informed electorate, transparency and stakeholder buy-in.”

That said, the failure of this will not make me give technology a bad name. No, technology, when correctly applied, can go a long way to make our elections more credible and transparent. INEC needs to learn from the flaws of the current system and start preparations immediately for 2019. If you want the best out of technology, then you must be prepared to get it right with the implementation. The case of the 2015 elections was that of good thinking, poor planning, and terrible execution.

R. Tombari Sibe