Nigeria's electoral body releases voters' register on diskette
March 15, 2007 by muyiwa
The following is from a Nigerian tabloid, the Daily Sun
On the apprehension of the people that barely a month to the election, the INEC had not released and published the voters’ register, Umeadi [Philip Umeadi is INEC's Commissioner in charge of information] dismissed the fears as unfounded, saying that the commission had since released the register and even forwarded it to all the political parties in soft copies, via diskette.
I cannot but keep wondering what the level and quality of IT intellectual capital in Abuja is. How would one explain the claim by INEC that it has fitted information about 61 million voters that it claims to have registered onto a diskette whose maximum data storage capacity is 1.4 million bytes. If we assume that the quantity of information collected on each registered voter is 100 bytes (to account for their name and address as a minimum), then 61 million people will result in 6.1 billion bytes, which will need over 4,000 diskettes to store! This is plainly ridiculous.
Another question that bears asking is how INEC intends to ensure that authenticity of the information on those diskettes. Diskettes are re-writable media, so how has INEC assured the political parties that the data it put on the diskettes is what eventually ends up in their hands?
Finally, I assume that the voters register is a public document, so why has INEC not considered publishing it online?
