Extending E-Democracy to Enhance Voter Registration and Identification: South Africa Elections Perspective

The increase in information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet has been useful and yielded positive impacts in today’s e-society. With e-democracy in particular, ICT can help build trust by engaging citizen in the policy process, promote open and responsible government and aid in preventing corruption. In the same way, ICT can also help protect the integrity of the elections especially during registration and identification of voters. This will go a long way to promote transparency and trustworthiness of the system, and possibly eliminates all forms election frauds multiple registrations, voting and impersonation. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to propose a new improved form of electoral process that aim at providing stronger security measures to protect and uphold its integrity. The approach requires the use of relevant ICTs tools to enhance both voter registration and identification processes on a real-time mode in order to fully guarantee that one person registers or votes only once. In this paper, we discuss in the perspective of South Africa (SA) elections. In addition, we developed a prototype called VOTEX to substantiate our idea, making use of biometric technology. KeywordsFinger print, Voters, E-democracy, Real-time, Registration, Identification