Design And Implementation Of Electronic Voting System

ABSTRACT

The Public opinion and democratic in universities setting are the most important determinant to establish a good administration. Voting is the process through which individuals convey their opinion and has the freedom to elect a leader of the choice to signify and address the student’s issues. In today’s technological and knowledge age, computerized related matters become widespread. E-voting is one of these substances and it is capable to deliver appropriate, less costly, fast and secure services. The aim of this paper is to present an electronic voting system (E- Voting) to be applied to Muni University student’s electoral body. Several security measures were integrated into the E-Voting system in order to achieve an enhanced, speedy and accurate performance. A computer software application was developed using PHP (Hypertext processor) programming language and MYSQL (My Structural Query Language), a relational database management system in designing the database; tested and found to have produced the expected results. It is about time that traditional voting in Muni University gives way to E-Voting and hence simplifies the task for Electoral commission and his/her Officials.

CHAPTER ONE

1.0                                          INTRODUCTION

Nigerian Universities are required to have free and fair elections for a democratic of the student’s union. Elections allow the populace to choose their representatives to express their preferences for how they will be governed. Thus, the integrity and accuracy of the election process are fundamental to the integrity of the democracy itself. Today, many new  technological innovations are developing the computerized security and fair exchange including electronic voting which is becoming a popular trend. Our University is also trying to keep abreast with the other established Universities in every arena. Therefore, students start to replace electronic voting instead of traditional paper voting for saving university resources and time. The implementation of secure electronic voting systems is very critical in every student’s electoral body. The main goal of e-Voting is to provide voters (students) a good environment so that students can cast their votes with minimum cost and efforts. There are so many properties that have been proposed to make the e-Voting secure process. The properties are: – Eligibility: Only eligible/registered students (voters) are permitted to cast and use the system. Secrecy: There is no association between student’s identification and the system. Exceptionalness: No student can cast his/her vote more than once. Freeness: A student does not gain any information (a receipt) which can be used to prove to a coercer that she/he voted in a certain way. Justice: No incomplete result is obtainable before the concluding result comes out. Confirmable: Students can verify that their votes were computed correctly. Uncoercibility: No student can prove what he voted for others to prevent bribery. Effectiveness: The calculations can be achieved within a realistic amount of period.

1.1                                 BACKGROUND OF STUDY

The advancement made in technology over the past few years has been tremendous. The computer alone has progressed at a remarkable pace, and updates are continually occurring. Along with the progress of the computer comes the transformation of the virtual world.  The Internet is a fairly recent concept that has profoundly affected our daily lives.  As with anything new, the Internet possesses various mysteries.  Research is being conducted to determine the possibilities of an on-line voting.  Internet voting opens the door to all sorts of possibilities for our state voting in future.

Therefore, voting is a means of selecting or choosing leaders, it does not apply only to local government, states and federal government of Nigeria but also in different institutions and social organization.  The conduct of elections in a democratic society is very important not only because through it a change of government is effected but also because voting is the main form of political participation for most people.  For democracy to be sound, it should be anchored on election free from fraud.

Over the years, the voting operation has been put under a manual system of operation which mostly results in inaccuracy and ineffective election.  It is gradually being realized that much faster accurate, effective and efficient system is needed to be adopted.  Here on-line is to be instituted to handle voting.

The on-line voting system ensures that each intended voter is checked whether he/she is registered or not, if he/she is not registered, the system refuses him voting.  Also it checks whether he/she has voted for that particular election.  This on-line voting system prevents a situation where a particular candidate seizes the voters’ cards, and uses them to vote for himself.  Hence the rigging associated with the manual voting systems has been completely handled.  The system also takes care of result calculation of each candidate in particular election and the percentage scored in that election. This eliminates rigging associated with the calculation and counting of votes.

A means of showing the various outputs is also adopted by the system the output can either be displayed on the screen or a hard copy of it can be produced depending on the choice of the user. This prevents interactive and unintentional typographical errors in showing the results of the elections.

With an on-line voting, voters can be cast only once it will also afford people who are sick and unable to go to polling stations to cast their vote to do so.  It should be noted however that on-line voting will not replace the existing ballot forms, but is offered as a supplementary way of casting a ballot.

1.2                                  STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The inefficiency of voting process in Nigeria has resulted in a lot of problems.  These problems have continued to obstruct the peace of democracy in Nigeria because the choice of a capable candidate is not encouraged by the current system.

These problems include

1. High rate of rigging during election process
2. Multiple voters

iii.            Inefficient and inaccurate counting of voters by officers concerned.

1. Long queues observed at polling stations
2. Illegible voters casting their vote
3. Lost of votes due to either wrong voting or the case of any accident occurring during transportation of the statement of result and other electoral materials to the collection centers.

1.3                                      OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The main objective of this project work is to design an on-line voting system which among others will be able to achieve the following targets;

(i)         Each voter will be able to vote only once for a particular election

(ii)      Nobody will have access to the votes before the official opening of the electronic ballot.

(iii)    The votes cast cannot be intercepted, modified or diverted.

(iv)    The on-line site will resist any attack

(v)      Only registered voters will have access to the application

(vi)    Voters will be protected against any attempt of identified theft.

(vii) The secrecy of the vote will be guaranteed

(viii)      Rigging of the election will be controlled

(ix)    The system will not accept vote outside the voting period

(x)      It will put to an end the indiscriminate alteration of election result by any officer of the electoral commission of Nigeria state.

1.4                                   SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The significance of this study is in the value of implementing the new system.  The study will activate democracy and ensure that the popular choice emerges victories in any local government election conducted in Nigeria.

1.5                                    SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The study covers voting processes as it is done at the ward councillorship election and local government chairmanship elections.  It also inculcates the voters’ personal records, candidates’ personal records and voting procedures.

1.6                                    DEFINITIONS OF TERMS

Ballot Paper:        Material with which voters used to cast their votes.

Ballot Box:            A container in which voters drop their votes

Ballot:                   A vote recorded in an election.

Collation Centre:  A designated location where results are collected.

Computer:            An electronic device that stores data, processes data and produces an output as information.

Democracy:          This is the government of the people for the people and by the people.

Election:               The act of choosing by voting one of the candidates for a position.

NSIEC:                 Nigeria State Independent Electoral Commission

Home Page:          The front door to a website.  Normally contains links to other sites or pages.

Poll:                     The process of voting at an election.

Poll Station:         A centre or venue where voters cast their votes.

Rigging:               To manipulate election result in favour of another person.

Voter’s Card:        This is a card given to a voter to ascertain that he has the right to vote.

Votes’ Register:     This is a register containing the data of eligible voters completed by the election officials.

1.7                                 BENEFITS OF THE STUDY

Online voting technology intends to speed the counting of ballots, reduce the cost of paying staff to count votes manually and can provide improved accessibility for disabled voters.

1.8                                             LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

It has been demonstrated that as voting systems become more complex and include software, different methods of election fraud become possible. Others also challenge the use of electronic voting from a theoretical point of view, arguing that humans are not equipped for verifying operations occurring within an electronic machine and that because people cannot verify these operations, the operations cannot be trusted.^[6] Furthermore, some computing experts have argued for the broader notion that people cannot trust any programming they did not author.^[7]

Critics of electronic voting, including security analyst Bruce Schneier, note that “computer security experts are unanimous on what to do, DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails… Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny”^[8] to ensure the accuracy of the voting system. Verifiable ballots are necessary because computers can and do malfunction, and because voting machines can be compromised.

Many insecurities have been found in commercial voting machines, such as using a default administration password. Cases have also been reported of machines making unpredictable, inconsistent errors. Key issues with electronic voting are therefore the openness of a system to public examination from outside experts, the creation of an authenticatable paper record of votes cast and a chain of custody for records.

There has been contention, especially in Nigeria, that electronic voting, especially DRE voting, could facilitate electoral fraud and may not be fully auditable. In addition, electronic voting has been criticised as unnecessary and expensive to introduce.