Citizen-centric perspectives on election administration and democratic process in Nigeria's fourth republic

Abstract

Elections are inevitable for democratic nourishment and their processes are a pathway to ideal legitimate political leadership. The core intent of the paper is to appraise two decades (1999-2019) of the democratic process in Nigeria's elections administration vis-a-vis citizen-centric viewpoint with reference to Lagos State. This research relies on primary and secondary sources of data collection. It adopted participatory democratic theory, precisely Dahl Polyarchy as a theoretical foundation. The findings of the study revealed that the 2003, 2007, and 2011 general elections were marred with various irregularities, but the non-interference disposition in 2015 by incumbent governments and leadership of INEC projected the mandate with fairness through better technological innovations. It was also revealed that the 2019 general elections possessed a typical element of the 2011 general elections with the conspicuous low turnout as its climax. The paper recommended among others, that there is a need for more continuity of the technological initiative in election administration, electoral management system (EMS) research, Continuous updating of voters' registers, and adjustments of operational and administration of logistics to make INEC more trustworthy referees in future elections.