HITEC UNIVERSITY TAXILA

Department of Electrical Engineering Subject: Engineering Project Management

LAUNCH OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE

Dated: August 8, 2011

Engineering Project Management 2011 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

All praises to the perfect and glorified Allah almighty, none has the right to be worshipped except Allah almighty, and ALLAH is the greatest. Allah almighty, Who not only provided us with this golden opportunity to enhance our skills, but also gave us strength and wisdom to work and plan with full devotion on our project and the related research work. Hazrat Mohammad (S.A.W) is like the sun, small to the eye when seen from afar, but when glimpsed close up, it dazzles and overwhelms. Hazrat Mohammad (S.A.W) is a light of guidance and knowledge for us. We admire HIS guidance above all humans. May Allahs blessings be showered upon our parents and all the teachers involved during the complete span of our educational pursuit. Though our group has carried out this project yet we are by no means the sole contributors towards the project. So many people have contributed to our research work, to our education, and it is our great pleasure to avail this opportunity to thank them. The person we would especially like to thank is our supervisor Ms. Sobia Hayee, her valuable guidance and encouragement at every stage has enabled us to complete this project. We are extremely grateful to her for constructive suggestions, valuable comments, continuous advices and illuminating points which were a big help while preparing this thesis. Without her kind supervision, this dissertation would not have taken its present shape. We are grateful to Mr. Waqas Ahmed for always being there to help us when required. In the end we would like to be obliged to Mr. Majid Aleem for giving us a chance to present our project in front of the class which would help us in projecting our product with confidence into the market.

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ABSTRACT
The electoral process in Pakistan has always been targeted for being toiling to participate in and producing results that are indications of deceitfulness and dishonesty. This project is an attempt to replace the current mechanism of voting with a more efficient, reliable and advanced setup. The voting machine is expected to eradicate the problems that persist before, during and after the elections. It substitutes the presently working system with an automated design that has the capability to identify, verify and recognize a voter without the involvement of a large polling staff. Moreover, it also keeps an authorized voter to cast his vote once. The recognition part verifies a registered voter on the basis of results obtained by matching his/her fingerprint with a template saved in a database and the information stored in the barcode pasted on the national identity card. In case of fingerprint matching, the target can be mainly decomposed into image preprocessing, feature extraction and feature match. For each sub-task, some classical and up-to-date methods in literatures are analyzed. Based on the analysis, an integrated solution for fingerprint recognition is developed for demonstration. The hardware is supported by MATLAB. For the program, some optimization at coding level and algorithm level are proposed to improve the performance of the fingerprint recognition system. These performance enhancements are shown by experiments conducted upon a variety of fingerprint images. Also, the experiments illustrate the key issues of fingerprint recognition that are consistent with what the available literatures say. The hardware in the system comprises of several units such as an image acquiring device, a barcode reader, a database with fingerprint templates of all registered voters, a voting unit, a counting unit and a unit for displaying results. Inside the hardware is the brain that works in the form of software to implement all these processes efficiently.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1-INTRODUCTION 2- BACKGROUND AND HISTORY 3- THE NEED OF AN ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM 4-THE ELECTORNIC VOTING MACHINE 5- COMPARISON 6- SCOPE AND APPLICATION AREAS 7- CONSIDERATIONS 8-CONCLUSIONS

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1. INTRODUCTION
All democratic nations of the world have devised a procedure of electing their representatives known as Elections. The procedure consists of candidates with their respective electoral signs and people cast their vote to their desired candidate. Elections are known to bring if they are held with transparency. Otherwise, they can be a call to a big chaos if revolutions they are concluded against the wishes of the public. In the modern world, elections are considered to be the most appropriate forum where people are free to express their choice for the benefit of their future generations. There are different levels of implementation of e-governance worldwide but it is more of an interest to find out this in the developing world.

1.1

ELECTIONS IN PAKISTAN

Pakistan is a democratic republic with a constitution that allows its citizens to elect their representatives at any level by means of a free and fair electoral process. Elections are sought to bring a change in the country and people have great expectations towards this mechanism. They vote for the candidate and the party which they prefer as the most suitable for the solution of their problems. Whenever the date for ballot voting is announced, preparations are made over a large scale and the nation prepares itself for playing their part in the course of action. But over some past decades, this selection of representatives has been a cause of constant disappointment and frustration for the people as the outcomes of the whole process are getting more and more unanticipated. The involvement of shrewd and wily procedures such as bogus votes and mock counting has significantly quashed the hopes of people disregarding the word Democracy. As a consequence a large number of public has stepped back from manual voting during the elections making the whole process a question mark. Following the developed countries of the world, Election Commission of Pakistan has shown a desire to implement E-voting in the country so that people could be brought back into the process of democratic selection of representatives. Electronic Voting System is capable of saving considerable printing stationary and transport of large volumes of electoral material. It is easy to transport, store, and maintain. It completely rules out the chance of invalid votes. Its use results in reduction of polling time, resulting in fewer problems in electoral preparations, law and order, and accurate counting without any mischief at the counting centre.

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2. BACKGROUND
2.1 WHAT HAS HAPPENED SO FAR?

Pakistan has always faced an issue of having real democracy in power and the basic reason why it has never been able to govern by proper leadership was insecurity of the people and distrust on the elections, elected bodies and the democratic environment where people can sell votes and people can buy votes without any problem. If we dig deep into the problem, we see the root cause is the ill mannered activities people do in the elections. As the whole system is manual so they buy votes or shake hands with the people working at rge voting stations. The people in command would fill their pockets and make the whole system unfair. Pakistan has had a history of unfair election results; if it is not, people would say it is an unfair result or the losing party will always complain about them. That is why there was no government surviving for the complete time period of 5 years and has always collapsed. As a result, Pakistan has always been missing the true democracy.

2.2

Aspects of absence of true Democracy

Along with the social aspects that include failure of governments to complete their 5 years, Army intervention, declaration of unfair elections by losing party etc. there are some technical aspects that negate the manual procedures of voting. They can be explained as follow: Appointment of polling staff is problematic. Polling staff can help in corruption during the polling, so many of the influential candidates try to appoint their own staff at their polling booths and thus the authorities are approached by such candidates. Increasing number of polling booths raises the number of staff required. Polling staff is appointed away from their area where they belong to, thus many of the people could not cast their vote. A huge number of ballot papers are printed and distributed on polling stations and these costs billions, not acceptable for a developing state like Pakistan. There is no check and balance on the timings of casting votes as some influential candidates let their own people cast cote even after the time is over. Many of the votes are regarded invalid as some voters leave their thumb impression in between the two check boxes. Presiding Officers count the ballot papers, but human-counting is usually sluggish and has chances of errors as well; which means an ultimate disaster ahead in the process on Democracy.

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Breaking down the problems more deeply into the security concerns we found that the present day system being followed by the Government of Pakistan is not secure and hence people can misuse the facilities. As there are a lot of financial issues with the Election Commission and hence cannot appoint so many security guards to make sure that the process runs smoothly without corruption and even if they do so, it is likely they will have a way to deceive them as well and keep on bluffing the government and the people.

3. THE NEED OF AN ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM

Keeping in view the above conditions and events, our group has decided to design an electronic system of voting that is to replace the existing electoral setup. This system is based on a mechanism that offers voting in an easier, efficient and quicker manner as compared to the existing toiling setup of elections and comprises of modern techniques and electronic equipment that offers accuracy and efficiency with a very little load of preparation. The voting mechanism is based on electronics; from the registration, identification and authentication of voters, through casting of votes to their counting and evaluation of results. This is supported by electromechanical or electronic equipment (including software, firmware, hardware and documentation required to program, control, and support equipment) to define ballots; to cast and count votes, and to report or display election results. 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.

Fig 3.1 Electronic Voting Machine

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3.1

EFFECTIVENESS

Effectiveness can be described as ability to achieve stated goals or objectives, judges in terms of both output and impact. In the case of electoral system, effectiveness means the power of a ballot to influence the election outcome. It can be based on four criteria as mentioned: i. Costs Resources Investments ii. Time Casting a vote Calculation of results iii. Results Correct results Avoiding human error iv. 4-Transparency The electronic voting has three main users; A-Voters (Time, transparency, correct results, easy-to-use system) B-Government (cost, time, results) C-Electoral candidates (time, transparency, correct results)

3.2

SUCCESS

If an event accomplishes its intended purpose, it is said to be successful. In case of e-voting success means being effective to replace paper-based voting. It should also satisfy the groups of users mentioned before. For voters it should b an easy-to-use system, providing fast voting, lesser complications (transparency), reliability, security, objectivity and faster results provided with paper-based system. From government perspective the system would be successful if the price of the system is affordable and not much sensitive for the budget, reusable, able to work in the long-term perspective and generates results in a short time. Also it should help to eradicate the complaints from voters and candidates about the procedure and results of the elections eliminating human factor errors. From the electoral candidates perspective e-voting will be successful if they get faster and correct results of voting and are able to monitor the electoral process at any time.

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4. THE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE

4.1 PHYSICAL LAYOUT

The system can be divided into different sections on the basis of the various processes being implemented on it at different levels: v. Voter recognition vi. Vote casting vii. Vote counting viii. Results

The system layout

4.2

A BRIEF DECRIPTION

All the three stages of the electronic voting machine are automated with a vey little human contribution. The voter is recognized and verified by using his/her fingerprint or the barcode on the national identity card. A fingerprint acquring device or a barcode reader with built in algorithms are involved in this stage. The obtained sample is then matched automatically with an original template stored in a database. If results are satisfactory, the person is marked and authenticated to cast his vote.
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The polling of votes is also an automated process which comprises of an LCD or a touch screenwith a clear display of all the electoral signs of the candidates participating in the election. Only an authorized voter is allowed to cast his vote by selecting the appropriate sign and then comforming the selected choice. The machine replaces the manual methods of counting by hands with a more accurate and error-free mechanism. It has built in separate software counters for each sign and whenever a valid vote is casted in favour of a candidate, the respective counter is incremented by a single value. The counter is free from any kind of human access or interrupt. After the voting has been completed, the machine dislays the result of all the counters one by one. A authorized person from the administration can then announce the result. As mentioned before the existing mechanism of manual voitng has many imperfections and consumes a lot of resources including money and time. So, to provide a substitue for the current electoral process, an electronic voting machine is a much better option.

5. COMPARISON BETWEEN MANUAL AND E-VOTING

MANUAL VOTING Chances of rigging, fake votes E-VOTING Transparent

Complaints from candidates as well as Very few complains citizens Governmental, Staff and Party Free from any external influence influence Long calculation time Effficient and quick Complicated procedures Miscounting Easy-to-use system Accurate computerized counting

6. SCOPE OF EVM AND APPLICATION AREAS

Considering the advanatges and features of the electronic voting machine it can replace all areas where manual voting is used. It can be employed to serve in: Presidential Elections National Assembly Provincial Assembly
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Districts Union councils Organizations Institutions

7. SOME CONSIDERATIONS
Awareness-about computer technology in rural areas of the country Literacy-make people literate enough to understand e-voting Infrastructure-strong infrastructure to support the new system Security-processes used eradicate illegal manipulations Transparency-process is open for anyone to monitor at any stage Public confidence-respect for the opinion of the people Training-officials to promote its effectiveness and media Smooth transition-to the new system without any offence Privacy-safety of personal data and information

8. CONCLUSIONS
While going through the various stages of the manual electoral process and then comparing them with the electronic voting machine, one can conclude that the latter is a more suitable and reliable option. A system that eradicates the complications of the manual methods and offers the citizens to play their part in the democratic process of electing representatives can bring a postive change through the country.

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