CORPORATE ELECTION

Something rather new happened at my office which was re-organizing the ORC Committe of company and appointment of a representative at the CIIN body of Nigeria. The same person was suppose to act as the ORC Committee leader in-house.

Due to the recent political development in Nigeria, there was a resultant political air in the entire company which has over 26 branches across the nation and somehow I was nominated to design an election system (online) for the exercise.

There are many such tools on the internet to help me get my job done but because there was a request that voters must be authenticated using the our internal active directory server, I chose to write my own voting system. Another reason being that I was told less than 24 hours to the exercise and I didn't think I had the luxury of time to learn something new.

Quickly, I wrapped up a four pages web application to for the voting exercise and also to release the results online as well. I relied on JNDI for connecting to Micrsoft Active Directory and jsp, jsf and servlets for the web applications not mentioning oracle for the database. Everything was done in time. My team members in other project hard-tested the application - they broke it once and I had to fix.
The application scaled quite well and users comments were quite impressive.

The election went quite smooth except for so branches that couldn't connect for some network failure during voting. Results were release online as expected.


The best thing of the day was that a major management staff asked me after the election, "WHY CAN'T THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT IMPLEMENT SUCH A SIMPLE PROCESS IN CONDUCTING ELECTIONS IN THIS COUNTRY?". There were answers.


I seem to have a new nick name in the company "JEGA" - the name of the current chairman of the independent electoral commission in Nigeria.