09-08-2012, 01:29 PM
electronic voting system
electronic voting system.pdf (Size: 1.05 MB / Downloads: 75)
Abstract
This project is to develop an electronic election system for Macao
legislation council election. The system provides the full services to
the election, from registration of voters to the result of the
election.
It is a client-server service with decentralized database. In the
server side of each booth, we have tomcat server with jsp pages
working with mysql database management system. Every server will
synchronize the data to the central database every 3 minutes. In
the client side, we need web browser with fingerprint reader.
The system we developed is a simple one. We hope that our system
can help to improve the efficiency of the election and simplify the
processes. The voters can use it and accept it with ease.
Motivation
In Macao nowadays, the developments make great strides.
Especially in the gaming industry, after the break of monopoly in
year 2002, profit increased times. But beside this, Macao also has
undeveloped fields; electronic election is one of them.
Nowadays, voters who want to vote in the legislation council
members’ election, have to user paper ballots. Something more, we
find that the progress of counting the ballots is quite primitive. This
makes the process very inefficiency and time consuming. We believe
that we can improve it based on our knowledge.
How do we start?
By studying the principles of election, we learn what we need to pay
attention to in the development of our system. By studying the
Macao legislation election law (the Macao 3/2001 law), we know that
the election, we learn the restrictions and regulations about the
election. After getting these fundamental elements, we start to
develop our system.
It is worth to mention here, that Macao legislation council election
is different. All candidates must form some groups to participate
the election. The voters vote for a group. The candidate in a group
gets the vote according to the candidate sequence. According to the
election law, sequence no.1 gets the vote divided by 1, sequence no.2
gets the vote divided by 2, and sequence no.3 gets the vote divided
by 4. After counting all votes, the candidates’ individual vote can be
showed and we get the result of the election.
The principles of election
Secrecy and anonymity - The choice made by the voter cannot
be revealed and the ballot must not record the voter
information.
Security - The ballots must be processed by authorized
staffs and stored and transferred in safety.
Simplicity - We must provide easy way for every voter to vote,
so that the method of voting will not be a barrier for all kinds
of voters.
Verifiability - The result of the election can be verified.
Traditional vs. electronic election
Traditional election has been used for decades. Everything
depends on human. From the beginning to the end of the election,
it needs a lot of human power. Here comes the bottle neck.
Human being is very intelligent, but iterant job doesn’t need
much intelligence but precision. Human beings process this very
slowly and not as precise as machine. This causes the progress of
election becomes long. Now let us take a look to the electronic
election.
With electronic election, we can shift the iterant jobs to the
computer. The computers count the ballots, produce the
statistical data and even transfer the ballots. It is very
convenient. The most important thing, in our system, we don’t
need everybody to relearn how an election is. The machines are
just a tool for the voters to vote and for the staffs to do the
iterant jobs. An election is still an election, the technique is just
to help. Now let us look at the table below to see how it differs
between traditional and electronic election.