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Friday, October 22, 2010

Please Swipe Your Card in this Slot

Ok so being the foreign guy that I am, I'm going to look at an issue facing my country. As many people know Nigeria is very high on the list of corrupt countries (you nod and I will hunt you down and tickle you with a feather!) in the world. People suggest all the time that someone does something to crack down on corruption. So I want to look at two initiatives: a national id card with id number, and voter registration and electronic ballots.

We have ID cards at home but they really serve no purpose except to show to a police officer at a traffic stop if you are suspicious looking. We don't have SSN like the USA or Canada so its really hard to keep track of individuals. There is no database that we store information in about the individual citizens. I am of the opinion that in order to keep track of births, deaths, population and other demographic info, we will eventually need to add some sort of system. So how should the government go about doing something like this? What scale of infrastructure would be required to carry out the registration of over 130 million people? Should the government outsource the operation to a company outside of government in order to accomplish it or should it focus on executing the process locally.

Through this registration process above, we can actually also register voters to vote. So when the time for elections roll around, keep the current basic corrupt system where soldiers are paid to confiscate and destroy ballot boxes or find a new way? I believe we should move towards electronic voting booths. But how do we implement this? Do we outsource the development of the machines to companies outside the govt or does the government create these machines? (This is a not a discussion of bigger government or whatever so keep the politics to yourself :-)). How should a company structure the systems in order to effectively run the polling stations?

Just some food for thought.

2 comments:

  1. The issues you raise occur frequently in developing countries and my home country, Jamaica,is no exception. As is the case in Nigeria, there is no centralized database with national's information and this makes it easy for corruption to occur. Jamaica has made some strides in the past 10 years or so to improve the electoral system and now we have computer readable voter registration cards. One area that really take advantage of a centralized database is the banking/lending sector. Banks in Jamaica don't share information and this opens up the oppportunity for people who have in the past defaulted on loans and are therefore uncreditworthy to simply move from one lending institution to the next. A consequence of this is that it makes it difficult to obtain loans because loans need to be secured by collateral and not by credit history as it is here in the United States and other developed countries.

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  2. Here is a question, when you say go outside of the government to a private company, are you thinking a company in Nigeria, or a company out of the U.S., Europe, or Asia. As sad as it is, I would not trust a Louisiana company to do something for Louisian government, to many people are connected and know each other. Nine times out of ten I would trust a company with zero connections to this state to come in and do a better job than an instate company. Would that be the same case in Nigeria?

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