Electronic Voting Machine

The purpose of this project is to provide an alternative to the current voting system which will be more secure and provide solutions to the issues in the existing EVM. Because there are no external communication pathways, hackers will have a difficult time hacking the system and tampering with the

Project Title

Electronic Voting Machine

Project Area of Specialization

Computer Science

Project Summary

The purpose of this project is to provide an alternative to the current voting system which will be more secure and provide solutions to the issues in the existing EVM. Because there are no external communication pathways, hackers will have a difficult time hacking the system and tampering with the count figures. As there is no manual counting of the votes so generating results will take quite less time compared to the traditional paper ballot vote. The voting machine will consist of a QR scanner and fingerprint scanner for the biometric verification of the voter. The machine will be under the presiding officer's control. Only he can start, end, pause or resume the voting procedure. If the voter is eligible to vote, he/she can then go on and cast vote. The candidate's name, party and the symbol of its relevant party will be displayed on the LCD screen. A voter can select his/her preferred candidate and the vote will be stored in its memory. The voter will be deleted to avoid double vote casts. To maintain the integrity of voter data and the votes after being cast, Hashing and cryptography will be applied. NADRA will generate a key using the CNIC of voters and then encrypt the voter data using this key. A fingerprint will be used for double verification in case CNIC gets stolen. It will then feed this encrypted data into the machine. As the CNIC and fingerprint of every person are unique, no one will be able to decrypt the data other than the voter himself.

Project Objectives

Free and equitable elections are keystones of democracy. One of the key yardsticks used to measure a state’s democratic condition is the conduct of periodic, competitive, participatory, credible, and nonviolent elections. As a result, a transparent system, similar to that of a digital system, is necessary. In order to reduce electoral fraud caused due to ballot papers, to avoid rigging of votes, Electronic Voting Machine is introduced in Pakistan. Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) combine the advantages of paper ballot voting with the efficiency of electronic polling. Even though it is extremely exact, the EVM saves a lot of time, money, and people. Without the need of ballot papers, it also aids in complete voting confidentiality. It makes the electoral process more competitive by lowering the winning margin and the vote percentage of the winning party. Pakistan has implemented its EVM, but security issues remain. Pakistan’s Election Commission has highlighted 37 issues with the existing EVM. The Election Commission’s main priority is data integrity throughout the voting process. We’ll use hash functions and encryption decryption techniques to tackle the data integrity problem. Our goal is to create a more secure and stable EVM.

Project Implementation Method

Data Feeding

• NADRA will generate a key using the voter’s CNIC number.
• Data of every voter will be encrypted with his/her particular key.
• After encrypting the data of all voters, NADRA will feed the machine with the encrypted data of all voters of a particular polling station.
• This encrypted data will be decrypted only when the voter will verify his/her Fingerprint and give CNIC number to make the key.

Hash Verification

• Hash verification is done to ensure the Data Integrity.
• For maintaining the data integrity from NADRA to polling stations and then back to the Election Commission, NADRA will generate a Hash Value which will be provided to all the officers and each officer will check the hash value when he receives the machine.
• After the voting process is complete, Presiding Officer and Polling Agents will generate a new Hash Value which will be checked at each step of transmission again.

Voter Verification

• Voter verification is done with the Fingerprint and CNIC number of the voter.
• Fingerprint scanner and QR scanner are used for this purpose.
• Voter places his/her thumb on the fingerprint scanner and once the fingerprint is matched, scans his CNIC with QR scanner, information of that particular voter will get decrypted with this verification.
• Once the voter is verified, the voter can then cast the vote.
• Once the vote has been casted, the balloting unit will stop accepting any new votes until a new voter gets verified.

Vote Counting and Verification

• Every casted vote is added in a counter for the total casted votes.
• After that every vote is again encrypted with the Fingerprint and CNIC number of the voter.
• This information can be decrypted by NADRA only.
• Once the voting process is complete, NADRA will send message to every voter for the verification purpose.
• Once the voting is completed, results are generated providing number of votes for each candidate and the candidate with maximum number of votes.

Benefits of the Project

The main benefits of this project are:

• To provide an alternate voting system where results calculation will be faster.
• To develop a system which will be unhackable to ensure fair elections.
• To maintain the integrity of the data inside the machine.
• To provide a sytem where fraudulent votes can be avoided.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Tools

• QR scanner to scan CNIC so that we can extract CNIC number out of it.
• Finger print scanner to scan fingerprint to do matching and verfify the voter.
• Receipt printer to get the total results of that polling station.
• SD card to store results as well as voters and candidates information.
• Push buttons to cast vote.

Techniques

• Encryption/Decryption.
• Hashing.
• Digital signatures
• Fingerprint matching
• File handling
• User Interfacing
• Hardware interfacing

Algorithms

• AES128 for encryption.
• Hashtables for data storage.
• SHA256 for hasing

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

IT

Other Industries

Core Technology

Others

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

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