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Cost Effective Online Voting System for Pakistan

ABSTRACT The Election Schedule for the conduct of General Elections as well as for the by-elections, as the case may be, is decided by the Chief Election Commissioner in Pakistan. The current system is being operated manually. Votes are polled manually. All the record of voters, candidates, polling stations, regions detail and parties information are stored manually. Results are calculated manually. All records are stored in registers and files. There is a big problem for election commission to manage the records. Our proposed cost effective Online Voting system will replace the manual record keeping system of voters, candidates; duty staff by polling the votes by a computerize system, which will reduce the chances of error occurrence, while counting, minimize time being consumed during counting, increase security of votes being polled. No chances of votes rejection and easy management of records. Key Words: E Voting, Framework, Polling Station, Election Commission. I. INTRODUCTION

can vote without any problem and feel secure and no one can manipulate the results. Such environment can only be created through some automated system which cannot be cheated by any one. 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 [7] [10] [11] [15]. Hereby; we will try to encounter these issues and suggest some better alternatives or solutions to stop these kinds of illegal activities. As soon as computer went on e move there was a need to figure out how to safe guard the sensitive information of companies and governments. Understanding the needs of time, the governments measured how to start and where to start. Security and trust are among the main issues in e Government, and are the main problems in practicing e Government [12]. Along with these issues one the main emergence of e government is e democracy specifically eVoting. How to secure eVoting; may it be electronics machines being used at polling stations, or getting citizen cast their votes through specifically driven websites for the sake of election [13]. II. E VOTING (ONLINE VOTING)

AKISTAN has always faced an issue of having real democracy in [6] 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 [10] can buy votes without any problems [7][8][9]. Digging deep into the problem the root cause is the ill mannered activities people do in the elections [7][8][9]. As the whole system is manual so they buy votes and / or shake hands with the people working at the polling stations [11]. And the people in command would fill their pockets and make the whole system unfair [10]. Therefore, Pakistan was in need of such a system where people

E-voting combines technology with the democratic process, in order to make voting more efficient and convenient for voters. E-voting (or electronic voting) allows voters to either vote by IJENS

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International Journal of Electrical & Computer Sciences IJECS-IJENS Vol: 11 No: 03 computer from their homes or at the polling station [29]. A. Online Voting at the Polling Booth This form of e-voting is virtually the same as regular voting, but replaces the ballot paper with a balloting machine or a computer. These machines / computers are only connected to a private network and server while voting is going on or after the voting is done. B. Online Voting Online The most advanced form of e-democracy would be voting online, which would allow voters to cast their votes from anywhere there is internet access. The Internet is viewed as a platform and delivery medium for tools that help to eliminate some of the distance constraints in direct democracy. Technical media for e-democracy can be expected to extend to mobile technologies such as phones.

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personal computers as voting terminals, with voters using a barcode to authenticate their votes. Voting terminals are linked to a server in each polling location using a secure local area network. No votes are taken or transmitted over a public network like the Internet. The voting system is used in the pre-poll voting centers, which are open for 3 weeks before polling day, and in a limited number of polling places on polling day. In polling places that do not have electronic voting, voters still use traditional paper ballots. In electronic polling places, voters are given a choice of voting electronically or on paper. Electronic counting, which combines the counting of electronic votes and paper ballots, was first used in the ACT at the October 2001 election and was again used in the October 2004 election. Preferences shown on paper ballots are data-entered by two independent operators, electronically checked for errors, and manually corrected if required. This data is then combined with the results of the electronic voting, and the computer program distributes preferences under the ACTs Hare-Clark electoral system. The software for the electronic voting and counting system was built using Linux open source software, which was chosen specifically for this electoral system to ensure that election software is open and transparent and could be made available to stakeholders, candidates and other participants in the electoral process. C. Online Voting in India Talking about an example in context with e-voting is interesting and it goes more interesting if the example is being taken from a country who has always been a rival of Pakistan in each and every walk of life, from War to Sports and from independence from British empire to the biggest democracy of the world. It even gets more interesting when we talk about the history of both countries, as its been 63 years of independence for both countries and both are highly populated countries, India the second and Pakistan the sixth. Even more interesting is both of them have base of Democracy behind their independence, but the history of both countries are totally different after Partition in terms of democracy. India truly became the biggest democracy of the world and Pakistan was never able to advance in a democratic environment, the reason was no true leadership, unfair elections, not having true will of people in power and each time we had a democratic government it faced charges of corruption and had to leave the house of power before completing the term of 5 years as is declared in the constitution of Pakistan. So the best way to define the need of

III.

SOME EXAMPLES OF ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM IMPLEMENTED IN OTHER COUNTRIES.

Electronic voting has been a hot issue for many states worldwide and lately some of these states implemented this as a replacement to their conventional electoral systems in practice. A. Brazil Brazil is a world leader in electronic elections, having conducting them since 1990. The elections in October 1998, was one of the largest electronic elections in history, with over sixty million voters casting ballots by computer for local and national candidates. 57 percent of the voting population voted electronically in elections for local, state and national offices. In accordance with Brazilian law, an initial election involving all candidates was held in October, and a run-off election between the top two vote-getters for each office was held in November. When the results were tabulated, Brazil had elected its President, 27 Senators, 27 Governors, and over 2000 state and local officials. B. Australia The ACT's electronic voting system, which was first used at the October 2001 election and was again used in the October 2004 election, is the first of its kind to be used for parliamentary elections in Australia. The system uses standard

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International Journal of Electrical & Computer Sciences IJECS-IJENS Vol: 11 No: 03 an electronic voting is to compare Pakistans electoral system to the Indian electoral system Incorrect casted vote will lose. Problems in filling the forms. Unauthorized vote casting.

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IV.

DETAIL WORKING OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM IN PAKISTAN.

ELECTION B. Drawbacks of the Existing Polling System.

The current system is being operated manually. Votes are polled manually. All the record of voters, candidates, polling stations, region details and parties information are stored manually. Results are calculated manually. A. Problems with the Existing Polling System Following are the problems in existing system: Appointment of polling staff is problematic. Polling staff can help in corruption during the polling, so many of the 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 the 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 this cost 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 vote even after the time is over; as it is normally From 8 AM till 5 PM. So this means people go on voting even after 5 PM. Many of the votes are not counted due to slight mistake by the voter, e.g. Voter left Thumb impression in between two check boxes etc. Presiding Officers count the ballot papers, but human counting is usually sluggish and has chances of error as well; which means an ultimate disaster ahead in the process of Democracy. Time is very important factor for measuring the efficiency of the system. The current system requires a lot of time for data process circulation and calculation. Problem for election commission to manage the records. Problem for duty staff to search the record of a particular voter. Problem for duty staff to calculate the votes results. Problem for voters to go on polling station to coast vote.

The following are the main drawbacks of in the current manual system: Because the current system cannot enhance the data validation in a meaning full manner, voters often the incomplete and incorrect data. The votes are cost manually so there is a chance of inaccurate vote calculations. The records of voters stores in files and folders and votes are also coasted on papers so increase in expense A small mistake can cause of rejection of vote.

V.

THE PROPOSED SYSTEM

The solution to the entire above problems is the computerization of existing system. Following problems are overcomes using the computerize system. System will replace the manual record keeping system by computerize system. System will reduce the chances of error occurrence, while calculation. System will minimize time being consumed. System will increase security of votes. System will not allow chance of rejection of vote. System will do easy management of records. System wills easy searching of desire record. System will do online polling. To know easily whether the voter is registered or not. High and reliable security can be achieved. Insertion sort algorithm is also one of oldest, easiest and most useful sorting algorithms for dealing with modicum of data set. If the first few objects are already sorted, an unsorted object can be inserted in the sorted set in proper place [10]. A. Delimitation When we are talking about implementation of an electronic system of voting in Pakistan it includes many areas we should consider while writing anything about it, but considering the

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International Journal of Electrical & Computer Sciences IJECS-IJENS Vol: 11 No: 03 scope of our research and limited time we attempted to narrow down our research areas. Here we will try to establish which way of electronic voting Pakistan should adopt in order to replace current electoral system with the electronic one. We limit our research to cost, time, results and transparency in terms of effectiveness of the suggested electronic system. We limit our research in terms of success to easy to use (easy as anyone can cast their vote, either literate or illiterate), cost, time, transparency and results only. There may be other users of this system but we limit our work to voters, Government and electoral candidates. We limit our research to social and technical aspects of the problems in the problem discussion We are not dealing here with any single aspect of ecommerce, e-management, e- services and edemocracy. But we did manage to narrow down our research work on Online voting as a part of edemocracy. There can be more than two ways online voting has its existence and we talked about online voting at polling booths and online voting online (internet based) in our work but we limit our research to online voting on polling booths only. B. Functional Requirement Following are some of the functional requirements of the proposed Online Voting System System will take as input Parties information that is names of parties, there symbol, etc. System will take as input Candidate information i.e. name, province, NIC (whole Bio data), his qualification etc. System will take as input Seats information that is region voice seats allocations for PA and NA. System will take as input Voters information that is NIC no, permanent address, all NIC information along with their thumb print etc. System will take as input Polling station detail that is location, presiding officer etc. System will take as input union council details i.e. Region, district and province in which it lies. System will do online vote polling. System will take as input Candidates information that is NIC no, education, age .gender, permanent address, all NIC information etc. System will generates result of each polling station. System will do voter registration. Result compilation i.e. correct result will be generated.

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Vote ineligibility i.e. not more than one time a voter can poll vote. Vote counting i.e. polling stations voice result calculation and overall result calculation. Symbol assignment process every party should have a symbol. Correct filling of forms. System must authenticate user Election results region voice. Election results party voice. Trend analysis of polling. Overall results. List of candidates. Symbol list seat voice in NA and in PA Login for staff members.

C. Non Functional Requirement The non functional requirement of the proposed system will be: The software will be user friendly. It will have the standard graphical user interface. Security of data. Ensure system development and coding is well documented for future use.

VI.

METHODOLOGY

Over times software (both generic and customized) have been developed using different software development methodologies, approaches, models, and techniques. In this paper, the software development methodology adopted was incremental model to develop the Online Voting system. With respect to industry standards, structured as well as object oriented approach was used to capture the system requirements and design. The online voting system developed is a web application. C# was used as development language and the database management system used is Microsoft SQL Server. The web Server Used is IIS. A. System Design Implementations In order to design and build a well structured system, it is highly vital to plan and understand how the data being inputted and outputted would be conveyed around the system. There are a number of tools that can be used to plot the construction / development of the online voting system from start to finish. The use of system models would be highly

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International Journal of Electrical & Computer Sciences IJECS-IJENS Vol: 11 No: 03 essential in describing and visualizing the way in which the system would be operated. In the case of the design for the secure online voting system, Entity Relationship Diagram would be used to show how the entities will interact and the whole process of polling will take place. Entity Relationship diagrams would be used to showcase the entire architecture of the whole system. This form of design would be very helpful to the system developers and would help in engineering the system in a consistent and efficient manner. In Figure 1 the ERD of the proposed system is shown.

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Province

Districts

Elections

Party

Symbols

NAregion

Candidate

PAregion

Staff

Poll

Union Councils

Polling Stations

Figure 1 Entity Relationship*

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International Journal of Electrical & Computer Sciences IJECS-IJENS Vol: 11 No: 03 A. System Implementations Few interfaces and reports from the software application development are captured in the figures below. MASTER PAGE A master page is a template for other pages, with shared layout and functionality. The master page defines placeholders for content pages. The result page is a combination (merge) of the master page and the content page. At first introduction page is displayed in the master page. ADMIN SECTION PAGE Admin section page will be displayed when administrator

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wills logged in. admin section page contains different buttons for different administrative tasks-g: To add a new election click on Election button in Add Record and to update election year. Similarly to register a new voter click on voter in add record column.

Figure 2 Introduction page LOGIN PAGE A Login control, which provides login functionality. Login control displayed when button with caption Admin Section or Staff Section is clicked. Admin section page is displayed when admin user will log in and Staff section is displayed when staff user will log in.

Figure 4 admin section page Some of the pages inside the admin section page Add Election To add new election year type the year in to the text box and then click add button and to clear the written text press clear button.

Figure 5 add election

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International Journal of Electrical & Computer Sciences IJECS-IJENS Vol: 11 No: 03 Add staff To add the new staff member for specific polling station fill the form in which the Add NA Region

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Figure 8 add NA Region

VII.

CONCLUSION

Figure 6 add staff Add Voter

When we see todays world, e government has played an enormous role in the advancement of the services provided by the government worldwide [1]. Today each and every country is giving e governance a go. There are different levels of implementation of the e governance worldwide but it is more of interest to find out this in developing countries. Pakistan is one of the emerging countries in the world which is trying to make a difference in the developed world and is implementing e government at an enormous rate [2]. This system of voting will certainly increase the turn out, security and result compilation much easy for the polling staff and the election commission.

Figure 7 add voter

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o THE PROPOSED SYSTEM IN A BRIEF The software tools used for the development are: ASP.Net 02.0 Adob Photoshop 07. Macromedia Flash Player. MS SQL Server 2005. Veryfinger 2.6 Extended for checking and authentication of the voter and staff.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2029204.stm 13. EETimes, Computer experts renew call for secure evoting http://www.eetimes.com/news/lastest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=193100139 14. Richard Bourne, Damaging Democracy-Pakistans Unfair Elections http://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/publications/nl/ articles/pakistan/damaging_democracy_pakistans_u nfair_elections.pdf 15. DHRP, Generally Fair, Exclusively unfair, Election 2002, Monitory Report http://action.web.ca/home/sap/attach/pk%20election %20monitor%202002.rtf 16. Election commission of Pakistan, http://www.ecp.gov.pk/content.item120.html 17. Daily Times, PML MNA disqualified for possessing fake degree http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=200 6%5C10%5C08%5Cstroy_8-10-2006_pg7_7 18. Pakistan Elections 2007, http://www.elections.com.pk 19. Bureau of Justice Assistant

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Internation Journal of Electrical & C nal Computer Scien nces IJECS-IJE ENS Vol: 11 No: 03 27. Internati ional telecomm munication unio (ITU), 2004 on 4, http://ww ww.itu.int/ITU U-D/e-strategies/eapplicat tions/Bulgaria/i index.html 28. Governm Informati Services of Canada, ment ion f Glossary y http://ww ww.communic cation.gc.ca/glo ossary.html 29. E-Gover rnment Challen nges and oppor rtunities http://ww ww.w3c.it/pap pers/cmg2005It taly.pdf

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Figure : Deta ailed Normalized form of Tab for Online Voting Datab bles e base.

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