DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
In every democratic setting with persons of differing and inconsistent opinions, decisions must be made between several options. This happens in business environment, educational environment, social organizations, and mostly in governance. One of the ways of making such a decision is through voting.
Voting is a formal process of expressing individual opinions for or against some motion. In the governance sector of many organisation this process is always used as a means of selecting or electing a leader. One of the key areas where voting is applied is in election. Election is the formal process of selecting a person for public office or of accepting or rejecting a political proposition by voting.
Online voting system is a software platform that allows registered voters to cast their votes. High quality online voting systems balance ballot security, accessibility and the overall requirements of an organization voting events. At their core, online voting systems protect the integrity of your vote by preventing voters from being able to vote multiple times. As a digital platform, they eliminate the need to gather in-person, cast votes using paper, or by any other means (e.g. email, insecure survey software).
You may hear an online voting system being referred to as an online election system, an online e voting system, or electronic voting. These all make reference to the same thing: a secure voting tool that allows your group to collect input from your group and closely scrutinize the results in real time.
1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
This project describes an online voting system that was designed to meet the electoral needs and also tackles the inherent problems of the present manual voting system. This current system—manual voting—is characterized by absenteeism, inconvenience, long queues, stress, a lot of paper work, error-prone human effort involved in vote computation, omissions, delays and other election irregularities which plague the system and defeat the whole aim of voting (Kohno et al , 2004). In view of the rapid development of computer technology in virtually all fields of operations and its use in relation to information management, it has become pertinent to look into the development of an Online Voting System that can achieve the following:
i. Conduct free and fair election
ii. Safeguard data and information in the system.
iii. Reduce workload in the process of conducting elections.
iv. Keep accurate record of votes.
v. Reduce time wasted in announcing election results.
vi. Eliminate disenfranchising electorates.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The present voting system applicable in the Nigerian electoral system has proved inefficient as the voters registration process is slow, the manual collation of results takes time and gives room for result manipulation, also the inaccessible nature of election venues which includes the long distances to be covered by voters to their registered location increases voters’ apathy towards the election processes, and finally the issues of ballot box snatching and damage and other election violence and issues associated with the traditional ballot paper voting all defiles the purpose of voting in election process as a formal process of expressing individual opinions for or against some motion.
1.3 JUSTIFICATION OF THE STUDY
The existing voting system encompasses a long process before the voting take place, a voter must register at the precise venue scheduled by the management, and the vote casting must be conducted in queue which result in high traffic to the areas with high population.
While the newly proposed system comes with the features that will overcome all the shortcomings of the existing system by giving the users ability to perform all the activities online.
1.4 AIM AND OBJECTIVES
In the quest to design a successful system to tackle the issues stated in the problem statement, the aim and objectives of the project are outlined below.
1.4.1 AIM
The aim of this project is to design and implement a low cost automated real-time e-voting system.
1.4.2 OBJECTIVES
Project Objectives includes
1. A detailed study of the election processes as it pertains to voting.
2. Design and develop a software platforms for voter registration, election voting, real-time election results collation and monitoring and mostly for voters remote access to elections.
3. Implement an automated/online voting system that should support multi-user environment.
4. Design and develop an administration dashboard for the election administrators.
5. Run simulations and compare the results of the designed e-voting system and other voting systems.
6. Validate the system to ensure that only legitimate voters are allowed to vote.
1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The proposed system is capable of allowing registered voters to cast votes online and also allowed the administrator to print the result after the completion of the election online.
1.6 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
This project work is mainly designed to enable the Independent National Electoral Commission to use electronic device to capture voter’s information, and to allow voters to cast their votes easily and comfortably to promote a more credible election which is efficient and less costly. The dynamic nature of the elections application interface and database structure allows for different organizations set up and conduct basic elections too. It’s online interface enables real-time election monitoring and result collation. Some of its major limitations are:
1. It requires network access: Since the collation and sending of votes to the database requires an internet access which may not be readily available in some urban area would seem a limiting factor.
2. The cost of setting up an e-voting system is high: Due to the delicate nature of such a system and the fact that its’ major components are presently not locally source, it would be quite costly to setup, but its usage and maintenance cost is far better than the present ballot paper system.
3. It depends on electricity to a point: In as much as it has an in built battery that can last for the required election duration on daily basis, a case of low battery would require it to recharge, which may not be possible if there is no electric power at the moment.
1.7 RESOURCES AND TECHNOLOGIES USED
In this section the technologies used to develop this system will be described (both the hardware and software technologies). Regarding to software, the system was built using the following software Windows OS, Dream weaver and XAMP whereas the hardware consist of computer system using Windows OS.
1.8 DEFINITION OF TERMS
1. Candidate: Is a person who will contest for an election
2. Voter: Is person who will register to cast a vote to a particular candidate
3. Votes: a formal indication of a choice between two or more candidates or courses of action, expressed typically through a ballot or a show of hands.
4. DBMS - Database Management System
5. MySQL Cluster enables users to meet the database challenges of next generation web, cloud, and communications services with uncompromising scalability, uptime.
6. HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is the code that is used to structure a web page and its content. For example, content could be structured within a set of paragraphs, a list of bulleted points, or using images and data tables.
7. CSS: Cascading Style sheet is the language we use to style an HTML document.
8. PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
9. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a set of web development techniques that uses various web technologies on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications.
1.9 CHAPTERIZATION
This project work on e-voting system is made up of five chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology and system design, systems implementation and result analysis, conclusion and recommendation. In the chapter one of this project, the introduction which briefly explains voting and elections in
general, is seen. It goes further to explain the background of an e-voting system, the aim and objectives of the e-voting system, its significance, scope, and constraints. It summaries; giving the project outline.
In the chapter two, a review of previous literature and technologies used for e-voting system was
treated. We also saw the different approaches to e-voting systems, their implementation, criticism with their literature reviews and noted the various gaps in the existing literatures.
In chapter three, we saw the block diagram of the project work, different methodologies used in development stages, the different phases of the project work which include its research, design, microcomputer programming, display programming, testing and fabrication. We extensively cover the requirements of the project, the mathematical models used, computer algorithms, designs and software incorporated in the work.
In chapter four, we talked about the steps taken and techniques used for the actual implementation of the project. We saw tests carried out to ensure that the project is efficient and also display the result gotten and their significance. We also saw the problems encountered and the techniques and solutions taken to overcome them or not. This chapter also sees the detailed analysis of the system. And finally, in chapter five, we concluded the work and gave notable recommendations for optimal operation of the product. Also we provided suggestions for improvement, enhancement and optimization of our existing work. We also outlined the major contribution to the body of knowledge in which our work has achieved.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1.1 OVERVIEW OF TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION
Two-factor authentication (also known as 2FA) is a type, or subset, of multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication is an authentication method in which a computer user is granted access only after successfully presenting two or more pieces of evidence (or factors) to an authentication mechanism, knowledge (something the user and only the user knows), possession (something the user and only the user has), and inherence (something the user and only the user is). Hence, 2FA is a method of confirming users' claimed identities by using a combination of two different factors: 1) something they know, 2) something they have, or 3) something they are. A good example of two-factor authentication is the withdrawing of money from an ATM; only the correct combination of a bank smart card (something the user possesses) and a PIN (something the user knows) allows the transaction to be carried out. Two other examples are to supplement a user-controlled password with a one-time password (OTP) or code generated and received by user (e.g a security token ) on smartphone that only the user possesses.
Another subset is Two-step verification or two-step authentication which is a method of confirming a user's claimed identity by utilizing something they know (password) and a second factor other than something they have or something they are. An example of a second step is the user repeating back something that was sent to them through an out-of-band mechanism. Also, the second step might be a six digit number generated by another system that is common to the user and the authentication system.
2.1.1.1 AUTHENTICATION FACTORS
The use of multiple authentication factors to prove one's identity is based on the premise that an unauthorized user is unlikely to be able to supply the factors required for access. If, in an authentication attempt, at least one of the components is missing or supplied incorrectly, the user's identity is not established with sufficient certainty and access to the system (e.g a building, or data,) being protected by multi-factor authentication then remains blocked. The authentication factors of a multi-factor authentication scheme may include:
1. Some physical object in the possession of the user, such as a USB stick with a secret token, a bank smart card, a key, etc.
2. Secret known to the user, such as a password, PIN (Personal Identity Number).
3. Some physical characteristic of the user (biometric), such as a fingerprint, eye iris, voice, typing speed, pattern in key press intervals, etc.
4. Somewhere you are, such as connection to a specific computing network or utilizing a GPS signal to identify the location.
The above authentication factors are further discussed under the following sub headings:
1. Knowledge Factors
2. Possession Factors
3. Inherent Factors
4. Location Based Factors
1. Knowledge Factors: are the most commonly used form of authentication. In this form, the user is required to prove knowledge of a secret in order to authenticate. A password is a secret word or string of characters that is used for user authentication. This is the most commonly used mechanism of authentication. Many multi-factor authentication techniques rely on password as one factor of authentication. Variations include both longer ones formed from multiple words (a passphrase) and the shorter, purely numeric, personal identification number (PIN) commonly used for ATM access.
Traditionally, passwords are expected to be memorized. Many secret questions such as "Where were you born?" are poor examples of a knowledge factor because they may be known to a wide group of people, or be able to be researched.
2. Possession Factors: ("something the user and only the user has") have been used for authentication for centuries, in the form of a key to a lock. The basic principle is that the key embodies a secret which is shared between the lock and the key, and the same principle underlies possession factor authentication in computer systems. A security token is an example of a possession factor. Possession factors could be grouped as follows:
i. Disconnected tokens.
ii. Connected tokens.
iii. Software tokens.
Disconnected tokens have no connections to the client computer. They typically use a built-in screen to display the generated authentication data, which is manually typed in by the user.
Date: 2026-08-12 00:00:00.000000