Geo-coding of Voters Residential Addresses: A Panacea to Election Malpractices in Jos South LGA of Plateau State, Nigeria

Abstract

The proceeds and the paraneferia of office enjoyed by the Executives and the Legislatures in Nigeria can never be compared with other clients all over the world that have been practicing constitutional democracy for centuries. That is why, the political elites involve themselves in all sorts of elections maleficent to perpetuate themselves in office by introducing twisted policies to subvert the will of the electorates. According to NSGIC's Geo-Enabled Elections project 2017-2019, transiting from the un-verifiable election method to a Geographic Information System (GIS), elections management requires a sound plan, effort and resolve. The inherent technical capacity of GIS visualization and analytical advantages involves replacing non-spatial 'voter's address file' systems with election district and voter location data in a GIS format. But in practice, it requires some additional investment, technology and resolves to answer the most frequently asked question from the electorates 'Does the election management body (INEC) in Nigeria know the geographic locations of their voters'?. This task of course requires relentless efforts from INEC and building the staff capacities and having synergy with relevant or sister organizations for data standards, exchange and metadata development. The file geo-database of point attribute data set of all eligible voters in the study was exported to ArcMap of ArcGIS into the geo-coder, where parameters were set for both urban and rural voters' proximity at the prompt of file geo-dBase. The implicit operations of the geocoder's algorithm generate the result on a spreadsheet format (.xlsx) revealing the name of each voter, the demographic characteristics, location (in terms of latitude and longitude) and shortest or nearest voting point. This reduces to a great extent multiple voting, and voter apathy and helps INEC plan effectively.