Enhancing the Democratic Process: A Proposal for an Electronic National Referendum System Using Preferential Voting

Tochukwu Abadi¹ , Ada Okereke²

Section:Review Paper, Product Type: Journal-Paper
Vol.9 , Issue.5 , pp.44-50, May-2023

Online published on May 31, 2023

Copyright © Tochukwu Abadi, Ada Okereke . This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 

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Abstract :
The legislative arm of government was created primarily to formulate laws and check the activities of the executive arm. However, in Nigeria, these functions have over the years been inefficiently executed and riddled with undue bias, to the detriment of Nigerians. With the steady increase in the number of internet users in the country, this project proposes a solution which leverages technology to allow the populace vote on key issues in the National Assembly. A web-based consensus system was developed, which will optimize the law-making process by providing a platform for citizens to vote on proposed bills and policies. Also, the preferential voting system was adopted. It involves the ranking of options in an order of preference. For an option to be selected, it must achieve an absolute majority, which is at least 50% of the total formal votes. This helps to ensure that selected option represents the true mind of the citizens. The Waterfall methodology was adopted in designing this application. The system was designed using HTML and JavaScript, while SQL was used to implement the database.

Key-Words / Index Term :
Consensus, Democracy, E-voting system, National Referendum, Policymaking, Preferential Voting

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