SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FOR THE INDEPENDENT NATIONAL ELECTORAL COMMISSION’S (INEC) ELECTION VIEWING PORTAL (IREV)

ABSTRACT

Free and fair elections are central to democratic governance. Nonetheless, many developing democracies continue to struggle with perfecting their election processes to enhance fairness and transparency. Even if elections are fair, the processes must be seen by citizens as transparent. Election technologies have been introduced to improve effectiveness and transparency in many countries. In Nigeria, one such technology is the Result Viewing (IReV) portal, which hosts election results as they are being transmitted live from polling units. Although IReV had worked in small-scale elections, it failed in the general elections, presumably because it was not engineered to handle the traffic generated from the concurrent uploads and result viewing of that scale. To this end, this paper proposes software engineering for IReV. The proposal includes a software architecture that leverages cloud computing for auto-scaling, a message queue for asynchronous transmissions, and technology to support low-connectivity environments. The paper also highlights the necessity to stress-test the IReV with progressive loads to mimic real-life traffic and estimate resource requirements and constraints.

Keywords: Software Engineering for IReV, Scalable IReV, Secured IReV