Design of an Electronic Voting Machine for Transparent Electoral Processes in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions

This project designs and implements an electronic voting machine prototype suitable for student union and staff association elections in Nigerian tertiary institutions, addressing the transparency and integrity challenges associated with manual ballot-based voting processes. Electoral malpractice, including ballot stuffing, multiple voting, and delayed result collation, undermines confidence in institutional governance. The proposed system uses an Arduino Mega microcontroller, a biometric fingerprint sensor module for voter authentication, and a 3.5-inch TFT touchscreen display for candidate selection. Each registered voter's fingerprint template is pre-enrolled in the system database, and the voter is permitted to cast only one vote per election, enforced by a voted-flag mechanism stored in EEPROM. Upon completing the voting session, the system displays a confirmation message and logs the vote in a tamper-resistant internal record. A results computation module tallies votes in real time and displays the running count to the presiding officer on a separate administrative interface. The system incorporates an SD card module for vote record backup and a real-time clock for timestamping individual voting events. Prototype testing was conducted with 30 volunteer participants at the Federal University of Technology Owerri, achieving 100 percent voter identification accuracy across all fingerprint matching attempts. Total voting cycle time per voter averaged 42 seconds. Stakeholder feedback from student union officials rated the system highly on transparency and ease of use. Recommendations include network connectivity for multi-location simultaneous elections. Keywords: electronic voting, biometric authentication, student election, fingerprint sensor, tertiary institution.