E-Voting

                        E-Voting is a fully web based voting software solution based on network security. With the access control capabilities and the reliability, the network security has tremendously increased in providing authenticity and security.  

The present system conducts the elections manually, which takes lot of effort for conducting, maintaining and evaluating the voting process. This Automation helps in overcoming all the above mentioned problems and also helps in avoiding any kind of tempering that can be done. Rather than employing expensive consultants to print and mail paper ballots or setup and manage your elections, E-Voting puts the power of online voting in the hands of election administrators.

This project makes use of Java Servlets which provides a Java-based solution used to address the problems currently associated with doing server-side programming. Servlets are objects that conform to a specific interface that can be plugged into a Java-based server. Servlets are to the server-side what applets are to the client-side.

Security is provided by RSA algorithm which is an ASSYMETRIC cryptographic algorithm with a pair of keys used for encryption and decryption.

Elections allow the populace to choose their representatives and express their preferences for how they will be governed. Naturally, the integrity of the election process is fundamental to the integrity of democracy itself. The election system must be sufficiently robust to withstand a variety of fraudulent behaviors and must be sufficiently transparent and comprehensible that voters and candidates can accept the results of an election. Unsurprisingly, history is littered with examples of elections being manipulated in order to influence their outcome.

PROBLEM DEFINITION:

The design of a “good” voting system, whether electronic or using traditional paper ballots or mechanical devices must satisfy a number of sometimes competing criteria. The anonymity of a voter’s ballot must be preserved, both to guarantee the voter’s safety when voting against a malevolent candidate, and to guarantee that voters have no evidence that proves which candidates received their votes. The existence of such evidence would allow votes to be purchased by a candidate. The voting system must also be tamper-resistant to thwart a wide range of attacks, including ballot stuffing by voters and incorrect tallying by insiders. A voting system must be comprehensible to and usable by the entire voting population, regardless of age, infirmity, or disability. Providing accessibility to such a diverse population is an important engineering problem and one where, if other security is done well, electronic voting could be a great improvement over current paper systems. Flaws in any of these aspects of a voting system, however, can lead to indecisive or incorrect election results.

PRESENT SYSTEM:

Presently elections are being conducted with electronic voting machines, which has revolutionized election conducting  process in the last decade.

FEATURES OF ELECTRONIC VOING MACHINE:

    An Electronic Voting Machine consists of two Units – a Control Unit and a Balloting Unit – joined by a five-meter cable.

    The Control Unit is with the Presiding Officer or a Polling Officer and the Balloting Unit is placed inside the voting compartment.

    Instead of issuing a ballot paper, the Polling Officer in-charge of the Control Unit will press the Ballot Button.

    This will enable the voter to cast his vote by pressing the blue button on the Balloting Unit against the candidate and symbol of his choice

                 

DISADVANTAGES OF EVM:

    If we want to engineer a repoll, we can bring an electromagnetic pulse generator near an EVM and erase its memory.

    The EVMs could also be interfered with after the election but before counting. All electronic circuits are susceptible to electromagnetic interference. Even when EVMs are kept physically sealed inside a strong room, an expert who knows the resonant frequencies of the circuits could remotely send signals from a distance away.

    It is also not known what physical shocks EVMs can withstand.

    Cost of  EVM is also a major drawback.

    This system does not avoid the manual work that is associated with the previous ballot system.

PROPOSED SYSTEM:

We speak of electronic voting when casting of votes is carried out by the voter directly by electronic means, thus obtaining an end to end digital vote .The use of paper and other physical systems is optional and auxiliary.

Types of  Online voting:

According to our previous definition, we can classify Online voting in two categories:

                a. Poll-site voting:

This type of electronic voting takes place when voters personally attend a specific place to cast their votes, usually through electronic devices such as touch screen voting terminals. The identity of the voter is verified with conventional methods (IDs, Passports, etc.).

b. Remote electronic voting:

This type of online voting takes place when voters cast their vote from any location with access to the Internet via mobile telephone, PCs, PDAs, etc. The methods used to identify the voter are via digital signature, biometrics, PIN codes, etc.

 

 The advantages offered by Online voting:

Ø Greater speed and accuracy in the tallying of votes.

Ø Greater savings in material costs in the printing and distribution of paper ballots.

Ø Greater accessibility for the disabled.

Ø Flexibility in the modification of ballot lay outs.

Ø Support of multiple languages.

Ø Better access to information regarding voting options.

Ø Prevention of involuntary errors when filling the ballot.

 When the electronic vote is remote, in addition to the previous advantages,    

  further benefits are provided:

Ø Economies of scale as the size of the electoral roll increases.

Ø Greater mobility and convenience for voters.

Ø Potential increase of participation in the voting process.

                          The proposed system is a fully web based voting software solution which makes efficient use of the developments in both Information Technology and Network Security. With the access control capabilities and the reliability, the Network Security has tremendously increased in providing authenticity and security.

FEATURES:

          We provide the following features in our E-Voting system:

Ø Voter can vote online with the help of his citizenship id. This is the number   on        the voter’s citizenship card.

Ø User’s choice is encrypted and sent to the server where it is decrypted and updated in the database maintaining the secrecy of, which party a particular voter voted for.

Ø We also provide facility for the contestants to upload their agenda and other information about their parties.

Ø We provide a facility for a administrator to maintain all the administrative activities.

At the end of the elections we declare the results with all the details of election.

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS                              

PROCESSOR    :  Intel 2.0 GHz or above

HARD DISK     :  80 GB

RAM                 :    512 MB RAM.

   SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

OPERATING SYSTEM                     : WINDOWS XP with SP2. 

LANGUAGE (FRONT END)   : JAVA (JDK1.5/1.6)

SERVER                                     : APACHE TOMCAT 5.5/6.0

WEB TECHNOLOGY              : HTML, JAVASCRIPT, CSS.

DATABASE (BACK END)        : ORACLE 10G.

ARCHITECTURE                      : 3-TIER ARCHITECTURE.