Christ the King Int’l School breaks ground with electronic voting system

Two ICT Teachers at the Christ the King International School in Accra have developed a unique computer-based voting system for the school’s internal elections.

Arguably the first of its kind for a basic school in Ghana, the teachers, Ernest Boye and Leonard Neequaye, used basic HTML (the standard markup language for creating web pages) and PHP, a programming language for web developers, to build the innovative system.

“We have been in this school for many years now and we saw the way the manual voting was done and we thought it wise that this year, why not put our heads together to see how best we can come up with a system that will at least speed up the process. So that is what happened here,” said Ernest Boye during voting last Friday.

Every year, over 600 students of the school vote to elect their School Prefect, Compound Prefect, Canteen Prefect and other positions.

On Friday, March 29 the students embarked on the annual exercise, only this time, the duration was cut short by more than four hours.

Head of Social Studies Department, Seth Tsatsu, who was the Electoral Commissioner during the process to elect a total of 12 students from over 40 for the various positions said the system will be improved for subsequent polls.

“I am so much impressed with this system because it is very fast. The manual one was very cumbersome. It wastes a lot of time. Maybe the whole day we will not be able to have classes. But even though this time we expanded the electoral college, still we were done by 12 pm,” he said.

He said it is likely that next year, an updated system will enable pupils to vote from their respective classes.

How the system works

The developers, Ernest Boye and Leonard Neequaye, inputted the Student IDs of each eligible voter into the voting system’s database.

 The unique IDs serve as the unique login credentials of the voters – pupils from Primary 3 to JHS 3.

When a student logs in, a link takes the voter to a page that shows the photos and names of the candidates. They then click to select their favourite candidate for a particular position.

A ‘next’ button takes the voter to a different page that has the names and photos of candidates of the next position. This goes on until the process is completed and students log out.

While the voting is going on, results go straight to a dedicated server for a live tabulation. This crucial feature of the system takes away the cumbersome process of sorting out and counting ballots after voting.

Commercialise

Ernest Boye said calls to commercialise the system are being considered although that may be a long way off.

“It is a new system. You have to try and test it. Before we consider [commercializing] we need to test it first. It is a good idea,” he stressed.

He said security features on the new system would have to be strengthened first.

Students’ reaction

Richard Akpe, a JHS 1 student said the novel system makes the voting process hassle-free.

“This one is better. It is faster and easier than the use of papers. Sometimes the papers can get missing during the vote. Some people too can sneak in papers which are not used for the voting. I think this one is better than the first one,” he said.

A final year student, Naa Ajorkor said it is unfortunate the new system came when she was just completing school.

She said, “people actually vote more than once with the paper one. But then this one is already set well. On a scale of 1 to 10, I will give it 9.5. This is the best.”

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