Electronic Voting Machine

International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 2, March 2013

A Preview on Microcontroller Based Electronic Voting Machine
Diponkar Paul and Sobuj Kumar Ray, Member, IACSIT

Abstract—Voting is most pivotal process of democratic society through which people determine it’s government. Governments around the world are increasingly considering the replacement of traditional paper-based voting schemes with electronic voting systems. Elections of Bangladesh are conducted most exclusively using electronic voting machines developed over the past three years. In this paper we describe the design, construction and operation of a digital voting machine using a microcontroller profoundly. Again we also portray counting system of votes, market survey and cost analysis. Index Terms—Voting system, atmega16l microcontroller, voting analysis, security of EVM.

I. INTRODUCTION Voting is a crucial device to reveal the opinion of a group on an issue that is under consideration. Based on the promise of greater efficiency, better scalability, faster speed, lower cost, and more convenience, voting is currently shifting from manual paper-based processing to automate electronic-based processing. The term “electronic voting” characteristically depicts to the use of some electronic means in voting and ensure the security, reliability, guarantee and transferency[1],[2]. Now a day the wide range of application of voting include its use in reality student body elections, shareholder meetings, and the passing of legislation in parliament. Perhaps the most important, influential, publicised, and widespread use of voting is its use in national elections. Compared to its traditional paper-based counterpart, electronic voting is considered to have many greater potential benefits. These benefits include better accuracy by eliminating the negative factor of human error, better coverage for remote locations, increased speed for tally computation, lower operational cost through

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Villafiorita, “Modeling and Analysis of Procedural Security in (e) Voting: The Trentino’s Approach and Experiences,” in Proc. of Usenix/Accurate Electronic Voting Technology Workshop, 2008. [11] R. Hite, “All Levels of Government are needed to Address Electronic Voting System Challenges,” Technical report, GAO, 2007. [1] Fig. 8. Flowchart of program IV. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS This work contributed to three very basic research questions arising: in the context of verifiable elections. First, we discussed the problem of keeping ballot secrecy to a certain extent in the case of a corrupted doting machine or voting authority. Our contribution to this is an approach where all secret information is encapsulated in the voting machine. Second, we considered the attack of receipt stealing and manipulation of the corresponding votes. Here we proposed a novel approach of linking all receipts by a hash chain such that each single receipt guards the integrity of all receipts issued previously. Together with a display in the polling place this approach shortens the time window in which an adversary can perform the ballot stealing attack without almost zero risk. Third, we discussed in detail the possibility of contesting an election based on the evidence provided by the verifiable election scheme. We compared the situation for Bingo Voting to the evidence provided by paper based schemes. We shortly sketched an approach to prove an error or a manipulation in the voting booth without violating ballot secrecy. However, this was only a proof of concept and for a practical application the usability of this approach needs to be further improved. V. CONCLUSION As part of these exercises, we devised a testing methodology, developed new tools that are specifically tailored to the security analysis of these systems, and learned a number of lessons, all of which should be of use to other 189 International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 2, March 2013 [12] M. Gondree, P. Wheeler, and D. D. Figueiredo, “A Critique of the 2002 FEC VSPT E-Voting Standards,” Technical report, Univ. of California, 2005. [13] R. Mercuri. Voting System Guidelines Comments. [Online]. Available: http:// www.wheresthepaper.org/VVSGComment.pdf, 2005. [Online]. Available: [14] Atmel. http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc2466.pdf Mr. Diponkar Paul is currently working as Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical and Electronic engineering at World University of Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh (www.wub.edu.bd ). After passing his master degree from March 2008 he was serving as Assistant Professor, EEE at Bangladesh University upto July 2010. He is having qualifications: B.Sc. Engg., DISM (software engineering), M.Sc. Engg. His research interests are in the area of energy conversions, power system modeling and advanced control theories covering the application of IT. From 0ct 2004 to July 2006, he was working as Lecturer in department of computer science and engineering at Pundra University of science & technology, Bogra. In Singapore during his master dgree at Nanyang technological university, he was involved in financial service operation integrated to IT system administration jobs from Dec 2006 to February 2008. Mr. Sobuj Kumar Ray was born in 1987, Bogra, Bangladesh. Mr. Ray received his Bachelor degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology (RUET), Rajshahi, Bangladesh in April 2010. He is now Assistant Manager (Technical) in DESCO. Mr. Ray worked at Internal University of Business Agriculture and Technology in the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Dhaka, Bangladesh (www.iubat.edu) from 12th July 2010 to 1st October, 2012. He is enthusiastic on researcher on control system and Power System. 190