CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.0 BACKGROUND
It has been the norm of the day that selecting leaders to lead countries, organizations, students in educational institutions and smaller groups in communities in the modern era is always associated with voting procedures. No matter how small or large a group may be, when it comes to its elections, all the stakeholders of such bodies may ascribe great interest. Not long, in the year 2016 to be precise, the country Ghana conducted its periodic election and the entire country became silent a while when the election results were pending to be announced by the Electoral Commission (EC) of the nation. At that moment, almost all Ghanaians with television set, radio set and other means of communications were completely glued to such means of communication when they were waiting to hear from the EC’s declaration of the election results. This scenario suggests that, people put in all their emotions when it comes to elections and therefore suggests that all voting procedures must be authentic, free and fair and reliable. Over the years, most educational institutions including Garden City University College (GCUC) have seen manual ways of conducting elections for their student bodies that mostly poses many problems such as over-voting, invalid vote casts and perceived unfairness. These problems and many others have been thorn in the flesh for most EC officials who conduct such voting events for their institutions. To help the EC officials in GCUC in this dimension, the researcher embarked on application of technology in solving the afore mentioned problems by designing and implementing an electronic voting system with biometric verification that provides reliable results and secured voting procedures. If this application is accepted and implemented, it will not only keep records and generate voting results but will also provide very secured environment to enable free and fair election. Moreover, the application has implement better data structures and algorithms that make it running fast. Though the project’s product was meant for GCUC, it had been designed with the intention of replicating it for other student bodies or associations in any other institution that may require the services of such application in their voting proceedings.