Nnadiebube Journal of Philosophy

Free and fair election is one of the features of true democracy. Election is said to be free and fair (credible) when it is free from all political manipulations by the INEC, candidates, political parties and government in power. This simply means, an election conducted in an atmosphere that is free of intimidation and harassment. It is quite very unfortunate that since the turn of democracy in Nigeria till date, all the elections conducted have not been free and fair despite several technological innovations employed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to drastically reduce the incidences of electoral malpractices such as rigging, ballot box snatching, over voting, killings, vote buying, result sheet mutilation, and other forms of election malpractices that characterized the history of elections in Nigeria. Nigeria had tried many systems of government that worked perfectly in other countries, adopted many strategies and methods to control these election manipulations and had employed a number of innovative approaches to improve the conduct of elections in Nigeria and as well to meet up with international standard, but unfortunately the more INEC adopts strategies to conduct credible elections, the more election riggers succeed. However, investigations show that neither these technologies; Electronic Voters Register (EVR), Biometric Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), Automatic Fingerprints Identification System(AFIS) and Smart Card Reader (SCR) nor electoral reforms developed by the government have reduced the incidences of election rigging in Nigeria. The paper argues that the problems with elections in Nigeria are weak institutions, the inability of the election umpire (INEC) to be truly independent, and the inability of the government in power to stop interfering with INEC. Using the method of philosophical analysis, the paper examines the past elections organized by INEC and the use of these costly devices, raises the questions: has technology addressed election malpractices in Nigeria? Did Nigeria’s election technology failed or was it

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