INTRODUCTION
“ONLINE
VOTING SYSTEM” is an online voting technique. In this system people who have
citizenship of India and whose age is above 18 years of age and any sex can
give his\her vote online without going to any physical polling station. There
is a database which is maintained in which all the names of voters with
complete information are stored.
In
“ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM” a voter can use his\her voting right online without any
difficulty. He\She has to be registered first for him/her to vote. Registration
is mainly done by the system administrator for security reasons. The system
Administrator registers the voters on a special site of the system visited by
him only by simply filling a registration form to register voter. Citizens
seeking registration are expected to contact the system administrator to submit
their details. After the validity of them being citizens of India has been
confirmed by the system administrator by comparing their details submitted with
those in existing databases such as those as the Registrar of Persons, the
citizen is then registered as a voter.
After
registration, the voter is assigned a secret Voter ID with which he/she can use
to log into the system and enjoy services provided by the system such as
voting. If invalid/wrong details are submitted, then the citizen is not
registered to vote.
BACKGROUND OF STUDY
The Online voting system (OVS) also known as
e-voting is a term encompassing several different types of voting embracing
both electronic means of counting votes. Electronic voting technology can
include punched cards, optical scan voting systems and specialized voting
kiosks (including self contained direct-recording electronic voting systems or
DRE). It can also involve transmission of ballots and votes via telephones,
private computer networks, or the internet.
Online
voting is an electronic way of choosing leaders via a web driven application.
The advantage of online voting over the common “queue method” is that the
voters have the choice of voting at their own free time and there is reduced
congestion. It also minimizes on errors of vote counting. The individual votes
are submitted in a database which can be queried to find out who of the
aspirants for a given post has the highest number of votes.
This
system is geared towards increasing the voting percentage in India since it has
been noted that with the old voting method {the Queue System}, the voter
turnout has been a wanting case. With system in place also, if high security is
applied, cases of false votes shall be reduced.
With
the “ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM”, a voter can use his\her voting right online without
any difficulty. He\She has to register as a voter first before being authorized
to vote. The registration should be done prior to the voting date to enable
data update in the database.
However,
not just anybody can vote. For one to participate in the elections, he/she must
have the requirements. For instance, he/she must be a registered citizen i.e.
must be 18 and above years old. As already stated, the project ‘Online Voting'
provides means for fast and convenient voting and access to this system is
limited only to registered voters.
Internet voting systems are appealing
for several reasons which include; People are getting more used to work with
computers to do all sorts of things, namely sensitive operations such as
shopping and home banking and they allow people to vote far from where they
usually live, helping to reduce absenteeism rate.
SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY
The main purposes of OVS include:
- Provision of improved voting services to
the voters through fast, timely and convenient voting.
- Reduction of the
costs incurred by the Indian Electoral Commission during voting time in
paying the very many clerks employed for the sake of the success of the manual
system.
- Check to ensure
that the members who are registered are the only ones to vote. Cases of
“Dead People” voting are also minimized.
- Online voting
system (OVS) will require being very precise or cost cutting to produce an
effective election management
system.
- Therefore crucial
points that this (OVS) emphasizes on are listed below.
1) Require
less number of staff during the election.
2) This
system is a lot easier to independently moderate the elections and subsequently
reinforce its transparency and fairness.
3) Less
capital, less effort, and less labor intensive, as the primary cost and effort
will focus primarily on creating, managing, and running a secure online portal.
4) Increased
number of voters as individual will find it easier and more convenient to vote,
especially those abroad.
OBJECTIVES
OF THE PROJECT
The specific objectives of the project include:
- Reviewing the
existing/current voting process or approach in India;
- Coming up with an automated voting system in India;
- Implementing a an
automated/online voting system;
- Validating the
system to ensure that only legible voters are allowed to vote.
PROJECT JUSTIFICATION
The ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM-INDIA shall reduce the time
spend making long queues at the polling stations during voting. It shall also
enable the voters to vote from any part of the globe as explained since this is
an online application available on the internet. Cases of vote miscounts shall
also be solved since at the backend of this system resides a well developed
database using MYSQL that can provide the correct data once it’s correctly
queried. Since the voting process shall be open as early as possible, the
voters shall have ample time to decide when and whom to vote for.
SCOPE OF STUDY
It is focused on studying the existing system of
voting in India and to make sure that the peoples vote is counts, for fairness
in the elective positions. This is also will produce:
·
Less effort and less
labor intensive, as the primary cost and focus primary on creating, managing,
and running a secure web voting portal.
·
Increasing number of
voters as individuals will find it easier and more convenient to vote,
especially those abroad.
OLD METHODS OF VOTING
1) Paper-based voting: The voter gets a
blank ballot and use a pen or a marker to indicate he want to vote for which
candidate. Hand-counted ballots is a time and labor consuming process, but it
is easy to manufacture paper ballots and the ballots can be retained for
verifying, this type is still the most common way to vote.
2) Lever voting machine: Lever machine is
peculiar equipment, and each lever is assigned for a corresponding candidate.
The voter pulls the lever to poll for his favorite candidate. This kind of
voting machine can count up the ballots automatically. Because its interface is
not user-friendly enough, giving some training to voters is necessary.
3) Direct recording electronic voting machine: This
type, which is abbreviated to DRE, integrates with keyboard; touch screen, or
buttons for the voter press to poll. Some of them lay in voting records and
counting the votes is very quickly. But the other DRE without keep voting
records are doubted about its accuracy.
4) Punch card: The voter uses
metallic hole-punch to punch a hole on the blank ballot. It can count votes
automatically, but if the voter’s perforation is incomplete, the result is
probably determined wrongfully.
5) Optical voting machine:
After each voter fills a circle correspond to their favorite candidate on the
blank ballot, this machine selects the darkest mark on each ballot for the vote
then computes the total result. This kind of machine counts up ballots rapidly.
However, if the voter fills over the circle, it will lead to the error result
of optical-scan.
Recent
years, a considerable number of countries has adopted E-voting for their
official elections. These countries include; America, Belgium, Japan and
Brazil.
SECURITY ISSUES OF ONLINE VOTING
Foreign experience revealed that they are often
confronted by security issues while the online voting system is running. The
origin of the security issues was due to not only outsider (such as voters and
attackers) but also insider (such as system developers and administrators),
even just because the inheritance of some objects in the source code are
unsuitable. These errors caused the voting system to crash.
The proposed solutions were correspondingly outlined
to hold back these attacks. For example, to avoid hacker making incursion into
the voting system via network, we can design our system to transmit data
without network. Another example is to limit voter to input particular data, so
that we can prevent the command injection from running.
·
Requirements:
1) Registration
of the voter is done by ELECTION COMMISION OF INDIA.
2) ELECTION
COMMISION OF INDIA can change the information any time if required.
3) Registration
of the Voter depends upon the information filled by the user.
4) Voter
is given a unique ID and PASSWORD.
5) In
the DATABASE information of every voter is stored.
6) Database
shows the information of every user.
Problems with the Existing Voter Registration System
The
problems of the existing manual system of voting include among others the
following:
1) Expensive and Time
consuming: The process of collecting data and
entering this data into the database takes too much time and is expensive to
conduct, for example, time and money is spent in printing data capture forms,
in preparing registration stations together with human resources, and there
after advertising the days set for registration process including sensitizing
voters on the need for registration, as well as time spent on entering this
data to the database.
2) Too much paper work:
The process involves too much paper work and paper storage which is difficult
as papers become bulky with the population size.
3) Errors during data
entry: Errors are part of all human beings; it
is very unlikely for humans to be 100 percent efficient in data entry.
4) Loss of registration
forms: Some times, registration forms get lost
after being filled in with voters’ details, in most cases these are difficult to
follow-up and therefore many remain unregistered even though they are voting
age nationals and interested in exercising their right to vote.
5) Short time provided to
view the voter register: This is a very big
problem since not all people have free time during the given short period of
time to check and update the voter register.
6) Above
all, a number of voters end up being locked out from voting.
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