Canadian Journal on Data Information and Knowledge Engineering Vol. 2 No. 3, June 2011 40 Reengineering the Traditional Electoral Process via Real-Time Registration and e-identification of Voters: An Approach for Developing Countries Obeten O. Ekabua and Bassey E. Isong Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Venda, Private Bag X5050, Thohoyandou 0950, South Africa. (obeten.ekabua@univen.ac.za, bassey.isong@univen.ac.za) Abstract: Many types of voting strategies are employed around the world. One of such strategy is e-voting. E- voting systems can greatly improve the efficiency, and potentially the transparency of national elections. However, e-voting introduces new sets of risks, doubts and opportunities for fraud and failure that cannot be contained in developing countries. In this paper we proposed an improvement of the traditional electoral system through real-time registration and e-identification of every voter before actual voting process commences. This approach will go a long way to eliminate multiple registrations/voting, impersonation and figures falsification as seldom found in developing countries. As a solution, while emphasizing the benefits of the system when implemented, we present an electoral system that is RFID-based utilizing the EPC network architecture. Keywords: e-voting, election, e-identification, RFID system, ICTs, real-time registration. 1. Introduction Elections are government initiated process that provides citizens with a service decided by a voting process. The end product of this process is the electoral result. It is thus crucial to organize elections that are unbiased, fair and devoid of manipulations. This is because the public can only be expected to gain confidence in the electoral system if it is based upon transparently fair, strong procedures and working methods [1],[11],[22]. This is only achievable when some form of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) tools are involved. The use of ICTs in governance particularly e-democracy has been commendable. E-democracy refers to the use of ICTs to connect politicians and citizens by means of information, voting, polling and discussion [1]. It is also defined by “the use of information and communication technologies to engage citizens, support the democratic decision-making processes and strengthen representative democracy” [2]. Many types of voting strategies are employed around the world. The application and impact of ICTs on electoral processes, particularly electronic voting (e-voting) has been beneficial. These systems have improved efficiency in the voting process as seen in many developed nations. This is because, winners of elections and the entire general public are usually pleased with the outcome if it is sufficiently transparent, accurate, free and fair, though it is more challenging to persuade the losers (and their supporters) that they lost [7]. Countries such as the US, UK, Brazil, France and India have already deployed e-voting widely [5],[22]. However, the use of ICTs poses both opportunities and threats for election. Though, these opportunities and threats cannot be equated for the fact that opportunities are always great. On one hand, ICTs in e-voting promise to bring about increased public confidence and participation in the political process, antidote to voter’s apathy, greater convenience in terms of voting time and location, reduced cost, and access to people with disabilities [8],[22]. While on the other hand, e-voting also threatens to undermine democracy by compounding existing election problems. According to [5], e-voting is a technology that threatens the integrity of our elections by introducing new sets of risks, doubts and opportunities for fraud and failure, and its technologies are not as safe, reusable, trustworthy or correct as promised by the suppliers. E-voting, though being presented as leverage to the traditional election system has failed to perform up to expectations and has exacerbated the problems. Considerable efforts have been made to put in place the trustworthiness of e-voting but all result in failure. The problems associated with the system are too complex to be handled, especially by developing nations. Therefore, it is vital to focus attention on the traditional and non-ICT oriented election process and re-engineered it using new ICTs tools other than the failed e-voting in order to make it more accurate, transparent and reusable. In addition to the flaws [13][14][15][16] in the existing e-voting, the problems many developing countries faced are the problems of authentication and verification of voters and his/ her eligibility to vote in the traditional voting system. The voting system does not pledge that the vote is cast by an authenticated person. This gives way to foul practices in the electoral process like chain voting [12], multiple voting, ghosts voting or impersonation. In this paper, we propose a solution of dealing with the problems in the traditional electoral system through the use of real-time registration and e-identification of voters before allowed to vote. The system makes use of ICTs tools such as radio frequency identification-based (RFID- based) voter’s card, RFID-based architecture utilizing the EPC network architecture. Also the proposed benefits of the systems are also highlighted. The paper focuses on the