International Journal of Computer Information Systems, Vol. 3, No.

4, 2011

INDIAN ELECTIONS AND MOBILE VOTING SYSTEM

Nitish Kumar
B-Tech IT VIT University, Vellore-632014, INDIA.

B.Persis Urbana Ivy

Asst.Prof (SG), VIT University, Vellore-632014, INDIA.

+91-9092637101
nitish.kumar2009@vit.ac.in

9884928763
prssivy454@gmail.com

Abstract This paper presents a Campus mobile voting system. In democratic country like India, it is important to know the opinions of students and also give a fare exposure to their upcoming political responsibilities. Such a system can increase their political awareness and will also lead to peaceful elections. The paper aims to develop an interactive secure voting system with which users can participate in election, with their mobile phones and even their laptops. It will lead to an integrated system capable of receiving new user signup, new candidate registration, authentic votes from mobile phones and laptops and outputting current results to users in various forms via their mobiles, laptops and public display screens located around the university campus. By using Mobile infrastructure a series of secure Mobile authentication mechanisms can be used to provide enhanced authentication and mobility along with privacy.
Keywords-component; formatting; style; styling; insert (key words)

remain on election duty are not able to vote due to their work responsibilities. C. Limitation of Constituency and specific voting place: An Indian citizen is allowed to vote for candidate of only a particular constituency and that too from a fixed polling station. Under such limitations a person away from his home town is not able to vote for a candidate from his/her constituency. This is one of the basic drawback of Indian Elections. D. Lack of political awareness: Young upcoming voters of India may lack interest in political activities of Nation. This can be due to three main reasons: Lack of political knowledge and awareness; No past voting experience; Find the voting procedure boring and have other things to do, than standing for hours in queue to cast a vote. Now taking the above issues into consideration, mobile voting system can be both Government and Voter friendly. The benefits associated with Mobile Voting System are: A. Increases Voter participation: Any person can vote from anywhere, from home, office, classroom and even from any place outside constituency with great authentication and security. Even old age and disabled people can exercise their democratic rights. Multiple Language supportive voting can be done, hence eliminating language barrier. B. Cost Effective: This will greatly decrease the election expenditure. C. Fast and accurate: The electronic gathering and counting of votes reduces the amount of time spent tallying votes and delivering results. Campus Mobile Voting System is a small scale implementation of this idea. India has more than 855 million mobile phone subscribers which nearly include a larger portion of voters in India. As far as any Technical University campus in India is concerned nearly 99% of the students have their personal mobile phones and soon it will reach to 100%. Taking the present condition into consideration Mobile Voting System is

I.

INTRODUCTION

India, the worlds largest democracy has been using traditional ballot paper method since independence. It had its own limitations and drawbacks. Introduction of EVM has made the process more secure on the government side, but the problems with the voter are still nearly unchanged. In Indian General Election 2009, there were 714 million voters, but out of them only 59.7% casted their vote, on an expense of more than eleven thousand million , in 543 constituencies of India. The question is why only 59.7% of voters voted. The reasons are numerous and widespread, but a few common points are: A. Fear of election: In elections voter has to elect only one and discard other candidates, people fear any sort opposition and personal harm which can be done by the supporters of lost candidates. Hence common people find it better not to vote. Any sort of terrorist attack during elections is also a vital cause of fear among people. B. Election duty: Most of the Government staff and teachers, soldiers of paramilitary, police and other forces who

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the upcoming voting trend, and Campus Voting System is just a short introduction of it. II. BACKGROUND DETAILS OF UNIVERSITY ELECTIONS

International Journal of Computer Information Systems, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2011 new account creation.

In any University there are a number of posts in the council, for which yearly election are carried out. Some posts are University level post such as President, some are school level post such as Vice President and Joint Secretary and some are year wise post such as First year and Second year representative. The orientation of council may slightly differ from one university to another. These elections can be easily conducted using a campus mobile voting system. III. WORKING OF VOTING SYSTEM
Figure 3(a) Sign Up Form Upper section Figure 3(b) Sign Up Form Lower section

Voting system will comprise of four main component; Central server, Central election database, Multiple clients (voters and candidates) and University personal network. The sequence of election process is as follows: A. Application distribution and Installation Every University maintains a record of their students, which also include their mobile number. Using this record from the University database, each student will be send the voting application via an SMS on their respective authenticated mobile phones. This message will also include the instructions for application installation. After installation of it in their mobile they are ready to connect to University personal network via the application.

Details such as user name, registration number, birthdate, mobile number, sex, school and password are taken. As Next button is pressed following things happen: Registration number validation is checked A past existing registration using the mentioned Registration number is checked, if there already exist such registration the new signup halts and appropriate error message is generated. If otherwise, the given mobile number is then checked that whether it belongs to the student who has above mentioned registration number. If not, the signup again halts and appropriate error message is generated. Otherwise, if all details are found correct then control moves to next page of Sign Up, shown in figure 4.

B. New user sign up(Registration) The figure below shows:

Figure 4: SignUp form Continues Figure 1: Login Page Figure 2: Login Page with Menu options

Figure 5: Registration Success message

In figure 1, the Login page for an account. In case of a new user a new account has to be created. Menu button consists of Sign Up option, which helps to move to sign up page, as shown in figure 2. The other options present in Menu are Login, Developers and Help. The functionality of these options will be discussed in detail in other coming sections. In figure 3, the SignUp Form, shows the details required for

In the next page of Sign Up process the Post for which any user wants to contest election is selected. Multiple options can be selected. If someone wants to be a general voter, he/she have to select NO POST option. Further there is a disclaimer section which gives the terms and condition to which an user should agree in order to be an integral part of election process. As Next button is pressed following things happen: Posts in council are reserved year wise or even branch wise, in such case registration number is helpful to know the branch and year of the student.

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International Journal of Computer Information Systems, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2011 Based on the registration number entered in previous page, eligibility of a candidate for a particular post is checked. Unique User ID is generated for each user, by using a complex secret algorithm After that the entire data is then stored in Central election database via University personal network. On successful storage of data in database the message shown in figure 5 is displayed. And within few seconds the unique User ID is send to the user via an SMS. As soon as SMS is received the Sign Up process completes and user can login to his/her account from the Login Page. If Candidate: This section can be access by the users who are also candidate. They can edit and change their manifesto and personal details. Change Password: In this section user can easily change their login password after authentication.

D. Give Vote ( Subsection in User Profile) This section is use to vote to candidates in election. The figure 7 shows Voting panel, where an user first select a particular school and then a post.On pressing Next button, names of all the candidates of selected school and post is displayed, as shown in figure 8.

C. User Profile Options With a correct input of unique User ID and its corresponding password any user can successfully login to his/her account. The first page of the user account is shown is figure 6.

Figure 8: Voting Panel

Figure 9: Candidates in selected school and post

On clicking to the highlighted name (with black colour) in figure 9, user can see the details of candidate, such as his/her personal profile, work done in past academic years and the proposed manifesto. Figure 10 shows such a display.
Figure 6: User Option Page

Main profile page consists of these options: View Profile: This shows the profile details. In case of candidate the information given in it will be shown to user during voting, in order to decide their candidate. Edit Profile: General user can edit their profile. Candidates can also modify their manifesto and other details. Notification: Latest news related to entire university election process will be shown in this section. Give Vote: All users can vote in all categories in which they are eligible, using this panel. Post wise and school wise details of all the candidates, can be seen from this section. But an user can vote only for those candidates who belong to his/her school and post for which he/she is eligible to vote. Vote Details: Details about votes given in past logins by the user can be seen in this particular section.

Figure 10: Candidate details

User can see the profile of all the candidates, belonging to any school, year or for any post, in the same manner as shown in figure 10.

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As Vote button is pressed following things happen: An error message is generated if any unauthorized user click Vote button, the process halts, showing appropriate message, on the page shown in figure 10. In case if any authorized user click Vote button, vote counter of that particular candidate for whom user voted increases by one, in Central election database. An SMS is send to user, in order to acknowledge the given vote. After this the user is now restricted to further cast his/her vote for this particular post of his school.

International Journal of Computer Information Systems, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2011 F. Result Declaration Tentative progress and results related to any candidate in the election can be seen on various display screens in the campus and also in the notification section of user profile or can even be known via SMS. IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE ENHANCEMENT

E. Voter Authentication and Security Voter authentication is one of the key issue related to clean execution of voting process. In Campus mobile voting system there are four strong level of Voter authentication, based on following things: Unique registration number for each student, and one registration number can be registered only once. Registration and voting can be done only from authenticated mobile number, already stored in University database. Unique and secure User ID for each user is send via SMS, which is further used for login purpose. And password, a key element of maintaining security.

A vast range of modification and enhancement can be done in the discussed voting system. Mobile (.jar format) and laptop (.exe format) version has been developed and work in its android form is under progress. Much work is needed to be done for better connectivity of mobiles throughout the university campus, so as to provide better security and consistency. Use of web for connectivity can be an option, but in that case each mobile should have internet connection which can be costly. Concepts related to Cloud computing can further enhance this system so that a large area of population can interact. In order to further enhance security, face recognition system can be integrated to the entire setup, which can greatly increase the authentication. In near future the Unique Identification Number (Aadhar scheme) can boost up this system, to conduct State as well as National level elections. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to acknowledge support of this work by my faculty, Prof. Persis Urbana Ivy B. and my friends for their feedback and suggestions during software development phase at Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. REFERENCES
[1] [2] Election Commision of India, Voter Registration, E-Roll Data-2011. K. Saleh, C. El-Morr, A. Mourtada and Y. Morad, Specifications of a mobile electronic voting system and a mobile agent platform, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Manish Kumar, T.V.Suresh Kumar, M. Hanumanthappa, D Evangelin Geetha, Secure Mobile Based Voting System. Wikipedia.

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