It will require nearly 250,000 gun-wielding soldiers, but Nigeria will shut down every street in its chaotically gridlocked cities on Saturday. Military checkpoints will prevent any cars from moving in the entire country of 150 million people.
It's just one of the extreme tactics in the relentless battle between Nigeria's election commission and its vote-rigging enemies. By emptying the streets and halting all traffic, the commission aims to thwart corrupt voters trying to cast multiple ballots at different polling stations in Saturday's parliamentary election.
Voters will have to walk to the nearest station - and remain there for most of the day. After being accredited in the morning, they will be corralled at the voting station until they finally cast their ballot in the afternoon. Many voters will then wait to verify the official results, which will be posted on a tally sheet at the polling station. It's a rare all-day voting procedure, tried in only a handful of countries in the world. If it works, it ensures that the number of votes does not exceed the number of voters.
With drastic measures like this, along with an elaborate $580-million system of fingerprints and photo identification, Nigeria is hoping for the cleanest election in its history. This might not seem like much of an accomplishment in a country with a long history of vote-rigging, but it could be a massive step forward for African democracy.
Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, was encumbered by military dictatorships for much of its post-colonial history. The military regimes were succeeded by corrupt governments that used bribery and violence to manipulate elections. But now Nigeria has ambitions to be an African leader, and its fight against vote-rigging could be a model for the continent.
The high-tech system of voter registration, using biometrics to capture data and prevent multiple voting, has weeded out an estimated 800,000 of the "ghost voters" - with names like "Bob Marley" and "Bill Gates" - who inflated the voter rolls in the disastrously corrupt election of four years ago.
"I was a skeptic about it, but it has worked," said former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark, co-leader of a team of election observers in Nigeria this week.
"It was a wise innovation," Mr. Clark said. "It's been a much better success than we had anticipated. If it's established as working here, it has credibility and promise to work elsewhere in the developing world, not just in Africa."
Nigeria's new election chief is a widely respected professor, Attahiru Jega, who has recruited thousands of students from the national youth corps to staff the 120,000 voting stations on election day. In the past, election workers were often recruited from the ranks of the ruling party, and they turned a blind eye to the vote-rigging practices.
In another tactic to outfox the riggers, the ballot papers and tally sheets were printed by foreign companies, with a host of secret security features and serial numbers. They were printed just days before the election, in a bid to prevent ballots falling into the hands of corrupt officials who might make counterfeit copies. But this was a risky move, and it backfired embarrassingly when one of the printing contractors failed to deliver the ballots on time, forcing a one-week postponement in the parliamentary and presidential election.
"Because we don't trust each other, the ballots must be printed abroad and must be printed at the last minute," said Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai, a former Nigerian cabinet minister who now supports an opposition candidate. "So if there's even a small glitch, the election gets all screwed up."
So far, however, the extreme tactics seem to be effective. The streets of Lagos - the biggest city in sub-Saharan Africa, normally clogged with traffic - were empty of vehicles on Saturday on the aborted first day of the elections. Roadblocks were rigorously manned by the national army, making it almost impossible for vote-riggers to get around.
The new voter-registration system has curbed the worst abuses of the past. The official list of 73 million voters may be inflated by 10 to 15 per cent, according to one expert opinion, but is still a vast improvement. One village in Kaduna state that provided a bizarre 50,000 votes for the ruling party in 2007 now has a more realistic 4,000 registered voters.
Much corruption remains. At some voting stations last Saturday, foreign observers saw children as young as 10 years old in the queue to vote, carrying voter cards that identified them as 18 or 19 years old. The ruling party chose its candidate, President Goodluck Jonathan, in a primary in which some delegates were paid up to $7,000 in cash for their vote.
There are warnings of violence as campaign tensions rise, with more than 70 people already killed in election-related clashes. "Many politicians still seem determined to use violence, bribery or rigging to win the spoils of office," said a report by the International Crisis Group.
Nigerians are not relying solely on their election commission to prevent fraud. A coalition of independent groups has set up Project Swift Count - a parallel vote count in thousands of voting stations to ensure that the official count is accurate. Other groups are using cellphone messages and e-mails to map any reports of electoral fraud.
"Nigerians are much more vigilant than they were in the 2007 election," says Hussaini Abdu, director of the Nigerian branch of ActionAid, a development agency.
The ruling party, the People's Democratic Party, is favoured to win the parliamentary and presidential elections. But its margin of victory is expected to be reduced, and the elections will be the most competitive in Nigeria's recent history.
Geoffrey York