| Title: WEB-BASED EVOTING SYSTEM FOR STUDENT UNION ELECTIONS: A CASE STUDY OF NAPES AT FEDERAL POLYTECHNIC ILARO |
| Authors: Ayodeji Bolanle Balogun and Olufunke Adewunmi Ayegbusi |
| Abstract: This paper presents the design, implementation, and empirical evaluation of a web-based electronic voting system deployed for the NAPES 2025/2026 General Election at the School of Engineering, Federal Polytechnic Ilaro, Nigeria. The system was built on a React 19 / Express 4 / tRPC 11 / MySQL stack and implements a three-role access control model (administrator, accreditor, voter), OTP-based voter authentication with a 15-minute expiry window, cryptographic vote anonymisation via SHA-256 hashing, a comprehensive audit trail, and a configurable results visibility control. The system processed 636 complete ballots from 3,189 registered voters across 14 positions, generating 8,904 individual vote records with zero detected integrity violations. Analysis of 215 logged API requests recorded a median (P50) response time of 445 ms, with 81.4% of requests completing under 1,000 ms. Peak concurrent load reached 8 simultaneous ballot submissions per minute during the 11:00–12:00 WAT peak hour. The OWASP analysis identified three fully mitigated threat categories (broken access control, injection, security logging) and three partially mitigated categories (cryptographic failures, security misconfiguration, authentication failures), with residual risks explicitly documented. The paper explicitly positions the system against prior Nigerian student e-voting implementations, identifying four design advances: cryptographic vote anonymisation, a multi-role accreditation workflow, a configurable results visibility control, and a complete audit trail with IP logging. |
| Keywords: e-voting, web application, student union election, otp authentication, vote anonymisation, security evaluation |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.52267/IJASER.2026.7205 |
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| Publication Certificate: Download |
| Date of Publication: 14-04-2026 |
| Published Issue & Volume: Vol 7 Issue 2 March-April 2026 |