Development of a secure online voting system

Abstract

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. Presently, the voting system in many countries is completely paper based and usually, from gathering information of the voters to voting, everything is done manually. So, there are many chances of mistakes, rigging, manipulation and corruption. Conducting secure and private elections can become even more difficult when voters are geographically distributed. On the other hand, voter participation in modern electoral democracies has reached record low across the industrialized world and justified or not, this trend is a strong driver of interest in Internet voting. In recent years, the issues of combining voting with information technology have developed into two directions: the former one is electronic voting (E-voting), which is voting on the particular machine in the fixed position; the latter is Internet voting (I-voting), which is voting on the Internet without limiting people in the polling station but needs higher level of security. The problem of I-voting is still critical in terms of safety and security. Elections have been conducted using online voting in developed countries like Estonia, Norway, Canada, Switzerland, etc. One of major limitation of existing online voting system is that it has no biometric identification. This project deals with the design and development of a web-based voting system using fingerprint and cryptography in order to provide high security to the voting system and additionally web technology is used to make the voting system more practical. The proposed Internet voting system allows the voters to scan their fingerprint, which is then matched with an already saved finger template within a database. Upon completion of voter identification, voters are allowed to cast their vote using voting website. Casted vote will be updated immediately. The result shows that the proposed Internet voting system is fast, efficient and secured.