12-04-2011, 11:43 AM
PRESENTED BY:
Vijay Jiragal
Bhagya patil
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Abstract-
Low budget Electronic Voting Machine! Sounds great and interesting! What one finds to be more interesting is that the day to day electronics can be used for most secured purposes of voting. This project has the ability to revolutionize the present ideas of voting system, if implemented on large scale it ensures choosing right person to lead our country and which is the dream goal of our project and of course it’s the wish of society people too, since voting can be termed as backbone of democracy. Moreover the project is highly eco-friendly, efficient and easy to implement with reasonable initial investment.
The system is proposed in such a way that it is designed to meet all specifications of the END user. Hence the problem statement is “low budget electronic voting machine which can be afforded by small organizations and make polling process successful”
Keywords- control unit, ballot unit
I. Introduction:
The Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) proposed retains same features of earlier methods of polling by using ballot papers while proposed system uses microcontrollers which made EVM closer to real time operation making it faster, more reliable and unique. The very fact is that the EVM system proposed has capacity of registering 3800 votes and the entire system is password protected has been jist of our project.
This paper is fully implemented and is of authors own work and the system is realized using 8052 microcontrollers.
II. Brief description of proposed system
The project can be divided into 2 parts
and can be analyzed separately.
1. Ballot unit
2. Control unit
A Ballot is one in which a voter can cast his vote and the control unit is used by the polling officials.
The proposed EVM has following features
1. It is highly economical (low budget).
2. Highly efficient and eco friendly.
3. Easy to implement with reasonable initial investment.
4. Error/fraud free system.
5. Instantaneous results.
III. Present market EVM
The present market EVM consists of mainly three units: control unit, ballot unit, DATA adapter unit. Here the control unit and ballot unit functions the same as mentioned above. The DATA adapter unit is used as communication port and is used for interfacing purposes such as counting of votes during polling process. This system is been costlier and cannot be affordable by small organizations, it needs training for operation of system making polling process cumbersome and hence there is a need of low budget EVM.
Disadvantages of existing system:
• Since communication ports are used, DATA tampering can be possible.
• High cost and high maintenance.
• Requires m training to use the system.
• Usually the results are declared after manual counting.
The existing system has hardware consisting of combinational circuits making the system costlier. Hence this forces to build a low budget EVM.
The proposed system has following advantages as follows
• Easy to operate and maintain.
• Highly economical.
• More reliable and error free.
• Instant results and can be used for small scale polling.
Hence this paper has a novel idea of proposing a low budget Electronic Voting Machine.
IV. Block diagram of proposed system
The proposed mainly consists of control unit, ballot unit, hex key pad, 16*2 LCD display, LED’s as shown in the below block diagram.
V. Deterministic Finite Automata modeling (DFA) of EVM:
The main intension of introducing the concept of automata in the Electronic Voting Machine is to provide the maximum security at a very low cost. By using the concept of automata the complex hardware’s can be replaced by the embedded computing. The state follow diagram of the DFA model is shown below.
The transition state of EVM works hand in hand with control unit and ballot unit. The transition state mainly consists of coordination of both control unit and ballot unit.
The transition state has following rules as follows:
• In state 1, When the power of Ballot unit is turned on, the ballot unit awaits a “READY SIGNAL” from control unit
• In state 2, after getting “READY SIGNAL”, ballot unit glows its “MACHINE READY” LED indicating that the machine is ready to accept a new vote from its candidate panel. Once the voter presses the button corresponding to the candidate of her/his choice, a four-bit code is generated and sent to the control unit.
• In state 3, the “MACHINE READY” LED turns off. This implies that any new vote cannot be cast now. The ballot unit waits for the “VOTE SIGNAL” to become low from control unit, which indicate that control unit has counted that for respective candidate.
• In state 4, “VOTE SIGNAL” goes low, the ballet unit glows the “VOTE CAST LED” on the vote cast panel for the corresponding candidate whose vote is being cast. At this time, the buzzer also generates a beep sound. This indicates to the voter that her/his vote has been processed. The machine returns to the step 1 and starts all over again for next voting.
VI. Advantages of using a DFA:-
• DFA can provide higher level of security, hence reducing errors and frauds while casting votes.
• It has simple mechanism.
• The model can be made pass word protected.
VII. Designing of model
To start the voting process, the polling officer has to enable the ballot unit and enabling ballot unit will be password protected. The enabling process will be constrained which means for every casting each single vote the control unit should send signal so many times. The block diagram is shown as follows.
VIII. how can this be a low budget device?
• The microcontroller 8052 is a economical computing microprocessor which comes inbuilt with most of the peripherals.
• State controller hardware is replaced with DFA implemented as software.
• No need of costly memory storage device like hard disks, instead economical EEPROM can be used for this purpose.
• Easy to fabricate and maintain.
IX. Implementation of module
The designed model of EVM is implemented on perforated PCB or what we call as dot matrix method. The model design is timed in such a way that it can record maximum of 5 votes per minute... this helps to prevent the booth capture which prevents recording of bogus votes within booth capture. Even for recording 100 bogus votes it needs 20 to 25 minutes, during which time the law and order officials may intervene to stop the rot.
X. Application of the project
1. Fast track voting which could be used in small scale elections, like resident welfare association, “panchayat” level election and other society level elections.
2. It could also be used to conduct opinion polls during annual share holders meeting.
3. It could also be used to conduct general assembly elections where number of candidates are less than or equal to eight in the current situation.
XI. Short comings of the project
1. The microcontroller used does not consist of large amount of memory to store large no of data or votes... This is overcome by using external EPROM.
2. The proposed system is designed for only 8 candidates. Designing system for more no of candidate’s increases complexity… This can be overcome by using higher microcontroller versions or 8255 IC.
3. The module is directly connected to 230 mains and is converted to 5v using step-down transformer. Hence power is required compulsorily. In absence of power the model fails…. This can be overcome by implementing battery backup
XII. Further improvements in project
1. Number of candidates could be increased by using other microcontroller or an 8255 IC.
2. It could be interfaced with printer to get the hard copy of the result almost instantly from the machine itself.
3. It could also be interfaced with the personal computer and result could be stored in the central server and its backup could be taken on the other backend servers.
4. Again, once the result is on the server it could be relayed on the network to various offices of the election conducting authority. Thus our project could make the result available any corner of the world in a matter of seconds.
XIII. Conclusion
The other kind of technologies or procedures used for casting a vote are by putting stamps against candidates name by using ballot papers, which is long, time consuming process and very much prone to errors and frauds. This procedure leads to wastage of millions of papers and in mean time transportation of ballot unfilled and filled box is difficult. Frauds may occur during counting as well as casting a vote. Illiterates can be easily deceived.
However our project has promised to overcome all the drawbacks successfully. The only left out thing is implementing it on a large scale. The present day voting machines used are uneconomical and cannot be afforded in large scale (12000 INR). The proposed model has been developed at a cost of 2000 INR.
