Online Voting System using Blockchain
Shivani Kolanu
Computer Science and Engineering
Malla Reddy Engineering College for Women
(Affiliated to JNTUH)
Hyderabad, India
shivanikolanu2000@gmail.com
Abstract— The
problem with the present EVMs is election fraud, election manipulation and vote
rigging. To avoid these kind of illegal interference of present election
system, this online voting helps people to elect their desired leader.
Government is spending lots of revenue on the EVMs and whole election process
which is killing time of the voters in the queues when they have come to cast
their vote. According to the census more than
9,000 crores spent by the government of India towards Lok Sabha
elections to buy EVMs and VVPAT units. Instead of spending on this EVMs
process, government can use Online voting system and can spend that previous
voting process revenue on the development of rural areas. This raises the
income of the rural India. This project will be an initiative and successful
step towards the development of Technology in rural India. In EVMs, results is
a time taking process where all the poll officers should be available before
and after the government seal. Whereas in our Online Voting, results will be
known within 3-4 hours.
Index Terms— Election fraud, vote rigging, VVPAT units, Technology, poll officers, development,
Face Recognition, Block Chain.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Elections are believed to be the key pillars of democracy and voting is one of the electoral processes
that ensure the sustenance of democracy in any civil society. Online voting is an electronic way of choosing leaders via a web driven application.
It provides a platform for simplifying
the electoral process for all institutions
that employ voting in decision-making.
It is geared towards increasing the voting
percentage in Universities and colleges . Since it has been noted that with the old voting method, the voter turnout has been a
wanting case. In 2013, It was estimated that about 69 percent of students stayed
away from registering to vote.
The project Online Voting system is designed to cast
the vote and also to count the number of votes and thereby calculate the
percentage of votes. Also the number of vote a candidate obtains is also
obtained. Along with the number the percentage of votes for each candidate is
calculated. The system is so designed that it can also check for duplication
since we use block chain to store the vote that the person had casted. It then
decides the winner in every section. The project is designed with a modular approach
and the number of modules is decided as per the requirements of the
organization. The two modules are administrator module and the user module. The
administrator has total authority of the organization and maintains all the
aspects. The user has the provision to view the list of all candidates according
to the constituency they are in and results as well as vote for the desired
candidates. And in this project it consists of face recognition as a security
to know whether the person is casting the vote is alive there or not. In this
project it stores the vote in the blocks of a block chain. The Software will be
under the technical team of the Election Commissioner of the Country.
II. EXISTING SYSTEM
Existing System consist of methods like paper ballet voting and EVM
voting. In EVM’s there is no transparency, verifiability, accuracy and
anonymity.
The problem with the present EVMs is election fraud, election manipulation and
vote rigging. Government is spending lots of revenue on the EVMs and whole
election process which is killing time of the voters in the queues when they
have come to cast their vote.
According to the census
more than 9,000 crores spent by the
government of India towards Lok Sabha elections to buy EVMs and VVPAT units.
This Electronic voting
is a time taking process, since the results will be know after a long duration.
For the results verification, this process will be requiring Poll Officers
before and after the seal.
Voters should be
standing in queues for longer time to wait for their turn. This kind of waiting
at polling booth’s is killing the time of the voters. Some voters face a
problem of not knowing their polling centers and due to which they will not
utilize their vote.
III. PROPOSED SYSTEM
Online Voting System using Blockchain, provides user friendly
interface for the people of India. According to the previous elections, it was
been recorded that the percentage of voting in rural areas is always greater
than percentage of voting in urban areas. There might be many problems like,
votes getting missed, migration to their hometowns to cast their vote etc.
Online voting enables voters to cast their vote privately and easily from any
location and on any device with internet access. This enables election
officials to assure that their votes remain cast-as-intended , recorded-as-cast
and counted-as-recorded. This project provides lot of Anonymity, Accuracy,
Verifiability and Transparency. In EVMs, results is a time taking process where
all the poll officers should be available before and after the government seal.
Whereas in Online Voting, results will be known within a very less time. That
is there’s lots of accuracy in this process. This system ensure tamper proof
and also ensure that electoral frauds do not happen in the process.
IV. FACE RECOGNITION
Face
recognition is a biometric software application capable of uniquely identifying
or verifying a person by comparing and analyzing patterns based on the person's
facial contours. Face recognition is mostly used for security purposes, though
there is increasing interest in other areas of use. In fact, face recognition
technology has received significant attention as it has potential for a wide
range of application related to law enforcement as well as other enterprises.
In order to provide security and to know whether that particular
voter is casting his/her vote, we introduced Face Recognition. If the Face
Recognition is successful, then it allows to the next step. If not, the session
gets exit.
The following is the screenshot of Face Recognition from the
proposed system.
The name get displayed based on the name in aadhaar of India. The
software gets trained from the database and then identifies the person.
V. BLOCKCHAIN
Through
Blockchain the election system can be made more transparent, convenient and
difficult to tamper into. The system will also ensure the identity and
eligibility of the voter.
To
simplify it, blockchain is a chain of digital blocks that
contain the records if the information or transactions sent across. According
to IBM’s Blockchain blog, any hacker
would need to change the block containing the record, along with the ones
connected to it to avoid detection, making the blockchain difficult to tamper
with.
For decades ballot box was the only voting mechanism in India. Later,
electronic voting machines (EVMs) came into play amid increasing reports
of booth capturing. However,
the EVMs have been often accused of being
tampered with as well. Keeping this in mind, enabling blockchain technology can prove
to be beneficial to end these claims once and for all. Blockchain deployment
in voting is gaining traction as various countries around the world have been
experimenting with the technology, primarily aiming to bring more transparency
and expand voter participation.
The following is the screenshot of Blockchain from the proposed
system.
As the block gets sealed, any person trying to hack or tamper should
open the seal which gives the hacker a value which is not actually in the
block. If the hacker tries to enter any new value, then the block gets
re-sealed which means the Election commission gets to know that, block got
tampered. In this way, we can reduce tampering or any kind of electoral frauds.
VI. STAGES UNDERGOING
A.
Review Stage
• Anonymity: Voter must always
be anonymous in the voting process. The system must aim at achieving the
political privacy.
• Accuracy: Accuracy is
maintained for every vote and every vote must be counted, and can’t be
duplicated, removed.
• Verifiability: The system should
verify that all votes are counted properly. Our solution support flexibility,
efficiency and mobility along with the main requirements.
• Transparency: The system must
maintain transparency such that every citizen must know what is happening, how
the vote is considered and counted.
B.
Final Stage
The expected
outcomes from this project are non-biased election, flexibility, effectiveness,
accuracy, transparency and anonymity, saves lots of revenue. This government
revenue can be used on rural areas to develop their livelihood which helps
rural India to increase its economy.
C.
Figure
The bar graph explains about the turnout in rural, semi-urban and in
urban areas of India. It clearly explains about the variation of turnout in
casting the votes between 2012 and 2017. The weight of the individuals casing
their vote has been decreasing from 2012 to 2017.And it clearly explain that
this change can be clearly seen in the urban areas.
When we consider the rural part of India the percentage of turnout
in the year 2012 is 71.8 and in the year 2017 is 70.6 , but when it comes to
semi-urban part it is 71.8 in 2012 and in 67.1.Apart from these two in the urban
area it’s been 71.1 but it decreased to 65 in the year of 2017.
This graph shows the
polling stations in Haryana. Here Urban
and Rural polling stations are separately shown. As we can see that the
number of polling stations in Urban are
more than 5000. Now if we see in Rural there are more stations compared to Urban. In rural we have nearly 13931 polling stations. The
total polling stations are 19441. Almost crores of amount is spent during
Elections. According
to the census more than 9,000 crores
spent by the government of India towards Lok Sabha elections to buy EVMs and
VVPAT units. Instead of spending on this EVMs process, government can use
Online voting system and can spend that previous voting process revenue on the
development of rural areas. This raises the income of the rural India. This
project will be an initiative and successful step towards the development of
Technology in rural India.
VII. Ease of Use
A. Adaptability of the System
The expected
outcomes from this project are non-biased election, flexibility, effectiveness,
accuracy, transparency and anonymity, saves lots of revenue. This government
revenue can be used on rural areas to develop their livelihood which helps
rural India to increase its economy.
B. Study Areas
The study area is
the polling centers in both rural and urban areas. Polling centers are the
places where the fraud may happen. So, the location we consider under study is
the polling booths of all the places in India.
VIII. Abbreviations & Acronyms
EC : Election
Commission.
EVM : Electronic
Voting Machine.
VVPAT : voter-verified paper audit trail.
OTP : One
Time Password
PS :
Polling Station
PC :
Parliamentary Constituency
AC :
Assembly Constituency
BLO :
Booth Level Officer
CEO :Chief
Electoral Officer
DEO :
District Election Officer
ECI :
Election commission of India
EEMS :
Election Expenditure Management System
IX. CONCLUSION
The proposed Online Voting System using Blockchain
is based on the Blockchain technology. Online
voting enables voters to cast their vote privately and easily from any location
and on any device with internet access. This approach increases the voting
percentage overall and gives a more accurate, transparent and fair election
system. This enables election officials to assure that their votes remain
cast-as-intended , recorded-as-cast and counted-as-recorded. This proposed
system ensure tamper proof and also ensure that electoral frauds do not happen
in the process. There would be no conflict in the process for calculating and
declaring result.
X. REFERENCES
[1]
The Hindu Business Line
published on October 21st, 2019
[2]
Investing.com published on
October 21st, 2019
[3]
Inc42.com published on 24th
October, 2019
[4]
Cryptobitmedia.com published on
23rd October, 2019
[5]
Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin- A peer
to peer Electronic cash system
[6]
DR.Gavin Wood,”Ethereum Yellow
paper 2014”
[7]
How online voting
works.usatoday.com
[8]
Wikipedia: The free
Encyclopedia, Technical Web link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_encryption
[9]
Gurchetan S Grewal, Mark D
Ryan, Sergiu Bursuc, Peter Y A Ryan. Caveat Coercitor: coercion-evidence in
electronic voting. 34th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2013
[10]
Government Accountability
Office (May 2004) "Electronic Voting Offers Opportunities and Presents
Challenges".
[11]
A.Gupta, I. Wormsbecker, and C.
Williamson, Experimental Evaluation of TCPPerformance in Multi-Hop Wireless Ad
Hoc Networks,‖ Proc. IEEE
MASCOTS 2004, Volendam, The Netherlands, 4–8 Oct. 2004,
pp. 3–11.
[12]
H. Singh and S. Singh, Energy
Consumption of TCP Reno, Newreno, and SACK in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks, ‖ACM SIGMETRICS Perf. Evaluation Rev., vol. 30, no. 1, June 2002, pp.
206-216.
[13]
Chip Craig J. Mathias
Principal, Farpoint Group COMNET 2003 Wireless Security: Critical Issues and
Solutions‖ 29 January 2003
[14]
Sandra Kay Miller Facing the
Challenge of Wireless Security‖ July 2001
[15]
T. L. Singal, Wireless
Communications, ISBN: 9780070681781, First Edition, Tata-McGraw Hill Education,
2010.
Comments
Post a Comment