Finger Print Enabled Electronic Voting Machine with Enhanced Security

Abstract

Electronic voting machines are getting popular day by day to conduct Election in densely populated countries. Bangladesh has almost 90 million voters and their biometric information. To make proper use of this information in Election for faster and transparent voting process, a Fingerprint enabled EVM has become a necessity. Currently available Biometric integrated EVMs have some issue with their security, vulnerability and power backup. This paper is about the design and construction of a FingerPrint enabled electronic voting machine (EVM) with greater security and power backup compared to the existing EVMs of this type. The machine is integrated with finger print and various steps of hardware security layers. The proposed design ensures accuracy, transparency, security and faster result processing in Election.

Full text

International Journal of Engineering and Technology Volume 5 No. 6, June, 2015
ISSN: 2049-3444 © 2015– IJET Publications UK. All rights reserved.
368
Finger Print Enabled Electronic Voting Machine with Enhanced
Security
1Syed Razwanul Haque, 2Miah Md. Asaduzzaman, 3Prasanta Bhattacharjee, 4Akhlak Uzzaman Ashik, 2Robi
Kormokar
1Lecturer, Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,Metropolitan University, Sylhet, Bangladesh
2Assistant Professor, Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Metropolitan University, Sylhet, Bangladesh
3Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, MetropolitanUniversity, Sylhet, Bangladesh
4Dept. of Physics, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh
ABSTRACT
Electronic voting machines are getting popular day by day to conduct Election in densely populated countries. Bangladesh has
almost 90 million voters and their biometric information. To make proper use of this information in Election for faster and
transparent voting process, a Finger-print enabled EVM has become a necessity. Currently available Biometric integrated EVMs
have some issue with their security, vulnerability and power backup. This paper is about the design and construction of a Finger-
Print enabled electronic voting machine (EVM) with greater security and power backup compared to the existing EVMs of this type.
The machine is integrated with finger print and various steps of hardware security layers. The proposed design ensures accuracy,
transparency, security and faster result processing in Election.
Keywords: EVM, Security, Finger print, Biometric.
1. INTRODUCTION
A. Conventional Voting Process:
This process is divided into four categories:
• Authentication: In this portion, every voter comes with his/her
voter id in the center. The presiding officer verifies the id of the
voter by matching it with the voter list comprising of the details
of the voter. After authentication, the officer provides a ballot
paper to the voter and marks his/her finger with a permanent
marker.
• Vote: After getting the ballot paper, the voter goes into covered
booth which is placed in a corner of the room, marks the Symbol
of the candidate of interest on the ballot, folds it and drops it in
the ballot box.
• Vote Counting: When the voting period ends, the presiding
officer collects all the ballot boxes of the center and starts
counting. While counting, it is very important to verify the
proper votes. Only the presiding officer and Election commission
nominated authorized members are eligible for this process.
• Result: After finishing counting, the presiding officer
announces the result and declares the winner of that particular
center
Conventional voting system requires a long period of time and
lots of stationeries. It is also vulnerable against illegal vote
casting. It is a manual system and there is always risk of manual
errors during the counting. All the above mentioned problems
make Electronic Voting Machine the necessity of a modern
democratic world.
B. Electronic Voting System Requirements:
Electronic voting system is not totally digital. It is combination
of manual/traditional and automatic electronic voting system.
Electronic Voting Requirements are given below:
• Convenience: The system should allow the voters to cast their
votes quickly in one session, and should not require many special
skills or intimidate the voter.
• Transparency: Both the Voters and candidates should be able to
possess a general knowledge and understanding of the voting
process.
• Flexibility: The system should be flexible so that it can allow a
variety of ballot question formats including open-ended
questions
• Accuracy: The system should record and count all the votes
correctly.
• Eligibility: Only authorized voters, who are registered, should
be able to vote.
• Uniqueness: No voter should be able to vote more than once.
• Auditability: It should be possible to verify that all votes have
been correctly accounted in the final election tally, and there
should be a reliable and demonstrable authentic record, in terms
of physical and permanent audit.

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369
• Voter Confirmation: The voter should be confirmed clearly that
his vote has been casted, and should be given a chance to modify
his vote before it is finally casted.
• No over-voting: The voters should be prevented from choosing
more than one candidate option.
• Under-voting: The voter may receive a warning for not voting,
but the system must not prevent under voting.
• Privacy: It should be confirmed that no one can access the
information about the vote.
2. DIFFERENT STEPS OF E-VOTING
A. Button Verification: Button verification is very important.
In every center, presiding officer will verify the button before
voting starts. He will check every button by pressing them and
sound coming from the pressed button will confirm its
workability. The process is called “Pre armed check”. After
verification of all the buttons the machine will start.
B. Finger Print Verification: Finger print or biometric voting
process is a highly advanced system that allows enrolling and
identifying millions of voters quickly and unmistakably. Use of
biometric information will minimize the possibility of illegal
vote casting. Ensuring quick and precise voter identification and
enrollment is the cornerstone of any credible election. A full
range of biometric parameters to identify the voters by
fingerprints requires highly customizable software modules for
both input and output settings. Fingerprint scanners are used
here. They provide a quick, easy, efficient, and secure
measurement. For example the fingerprint of an employee is
stored in a database that the scanner queries every time it is used.
The scanner goes through two basic Boolean conditions when an
individual’s print is scanned. First, the print is usually searched
in a database of fingerprints. Once it is found, then it looks at the
print to see what access privileges are associated with the print
and compares them to the access they are trying to gain. If
everything matches, then the subject is allowed access and if not,
they are not allowed. A log of the event is usually stored for
security purposes. The size of these devices is another reason for
becoming so mainstream recently. The objective of voting is to
allow voters to exercise their right to express their choices
regarding specific issues, pieces of legislation, citizen initiatives,
constitutional amendments, recalls and/or to choose their
government and political representatives [2].
Technology is being used more and more as a tool to assist
voters to cast their votes. To allow the exercise of this, almost
all voting systems around the world include the following
steps:
• Voter identification and authentication
• Voting and recording of casted vote
• Vote counting
• Publication of election result
Voter identification is required during two phases of the electoral
process: first for voter registration in order to establish the right
to vote and afterwards, at voting time and to allow a citizen to
exercise their right to vote by verifying if the person satisfies all
the requirements needed to vote (authentication) [3]. The field of
biometrics was formed and has since expanded on to many types
of physical identification. Still, the human fingerprint remains a
very common identifier and the biometric method of choice
among law enforcement [1]. These concepts of human
identification have lead to the development of fingerprint
scanners that serve to quickly identify individuals and assign
access privileges. Finger print recognition, the electronic
methods of recording and recognizing an individual finger print,
advanced substantially during the last decade of the 21th century
[4].
3. EXISTING E-VOTING SYSTEM
Electronic voting system has brought revolutionary change in the
traditional manual voting system. It can easily make that voting
process simple and joyful. Main purpose of a Voting machine is
to record vote and provide result very fast. The category
“electronic voting” is potentially broad, referring to several
distinct possible stages of electronic usage during the course of
an election.
A. Electronic voting: Electronic voting refers to any system
where a voter casts his or her ballot using an electronic
system, rather than a paper. Once recorded, an electronic
vote is stored digitally and transferred from each electronic
voting machine to a counting system.
B. Electronic vote counting: Electronic vote counting refers
to the system that is used to tabulate ballots and award seats.
It would be possible to vote using a non-electronic medium
and then convert these votes to an electronic system and
award seats through an electronic vote counting system.
Electronic Voting Machine is a simple electronic device used to
record votes in place of ballot papers and boxes which were used
earlier in conventional voting system [4]. It is a simple machine
that can be operated easily by both the polling personnel and the
voters. Being a standalone machine without any network
connectivity, nobody can interfere with its programming and
manipulate the result. Keeping the erratic power supply position
in many places in the country, the machines have been made to
run on batteries. It has mainly two units: Control unit and Ballot
unit. The Control Unit is the main unit which stores all data and
controls the functioning of EVM. The program which controls
the functioning of the control unit is burnt into a microchip on a
“one time programmable basis”. Once burnt it cannot be read,
copied out or altered. The EVMs use dynamic coding to enhance
security of data transmitted from ballot unit to control unit. The
new EVMs have also got real time clock and date-time stamping
facility which enables them to record the exact time and date
whenever a key is pressed. After the voting is completed and the
close button is pressed, the machine does not accept any data or
record any vote. Through the press of “total” button, the control
unit can display the number of votes recorded till that time which
can be cross checked with the register of voters. The display
system of the control unit shows the total number of votes polled
in a polling station and the candidate-wise votes polled in the
machine when the ‘result’ button is pressed by the counting staff
in the presence of counting agents at the counting center. The
control unit can also detect any physical tampering made with
the connecting cable and indicate the same in the display unit
[6].

International Journal of Engineering and Technology (IJET) – Volume 5 No. 6, June, 2015
ISSN: 2049-3444 © 2015– IJET Publications UK. All rights reserved.
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4. PROPOSED ELECTRONIC VOTING
MACHINE
In the proposed machine there is no network connection, that’s
why there is no chance to manipulate the result remotely. There
is no way to change the microprocessor code. All the results are
saved in a powerful SD card. It has real time clock and date.
Battery unit is connected with control unit and ballot unit.
A. Hardware Units:
The machine has two units which are totally separated. They are
given below:
• Control Unit: This unit maintains the whole system. It has a
reset button, clear button, stop button, cancel button, result
button. When reset button is pressed, then the machine is ready
for vote. A sound confirms presiding officer that the machine is
ready for voting.
If presiding officer presses the reset button twice, then it
generates a warning signal and presiding officer can use the
‘Cancel button’ to cancel the previous reset condition. After
successful cancellation, the unit generates another sound. When
the voting period is finished, presiding officer can end the voting
session by pressing ‘’Stop’ button. There is a display on control
unit for displaying result. After ending the session, the presiding
officer has to press the ‘Result’ button for getting the total count
of each candidate. Individual counts of the candidates are
displayed on the display of the unit. When results are shown on
the display, a light is turned on with a message that the Voting
session of the center has been completed.
• Ballot Unit: The ballot unit is comprised of candidates’
names, their voting signs and a button beside each of them.
When the verification procedure is done, the voter goes into the
ballot unit room. Then the presiding officer presses the Reset
button and makes the machine prepared for voting and the voter
casts his vote. After the successful casting of a vote the machine
will bell a sound and voice message will be heard. A light will
turn-on in the control unit to give the Presiding officer
confirmation of the casted vote.
B. Enhanced Security
• Pre Armed Check: Every switch of EVM is important and after
turning on the EVM, first thing is to make sure that they are
functioning properly. For this issue, a special on board checking
system has been introduced which is called Pre Armed Check. In
this system, the authority must press every switch to turn on the
EVM. If the on board microcontroller detects that all switches
are functioning properly, only then the device will be activated
for voting.
• Memory card Error Check: The device will always check the
activity of memory card. If memory card has an error or does not
work properly, then the device will give a warning alert.
Different memory layer has different warning alert pattern. By
hearing warning alert pattern, the faulty memory card layer can
be identified instantly.
• Energy Level Indicator: The device contains an energy level
indicator to get the updates of battery health. The on board
microcontroller always read voltage of the battery by using a 10-
bit built-in Analog to Digital converter (ADC). Then it shows the
value of the battery voltage on a LCD display. The
microcontroller also gives a battery low warning alert, when the
battery charge goes down below 30% of its capacity.
• Over enabling indicator and log: The device will give
warning alert if over enabling is occurred. There is an activity
log recording system. That’s why it is possible to analyze log
data and view all the previous activities of this machine if any
suspicious incident happens.
• MCU input surge protection: Microcontroller input pin will
not receive any false trigger during any surge. Every pulse is
analyzed and then executed.
• Device Doctoring Protection: The device will be
automatically deactivated if any one try open it or try to
change or modify the functionality of the device.
• Multiple Memory: The device has multiple memory layers
and all the information are saved into these memory layers.
That’s why data can be collected from other layers if any one
of the memory layers is damaged or does not work properly.
5. COORDINATION OF FRAMEWORK
Coordination of framework is the main part which ensures the
secured voting process along with the key button, liquid crystal
display (LCD), microcontroller, finger print module, SD card
and total processing of the system. [8]
The Arduino Mega 2560 is a microcontroller board based on the
ATmega2560. It has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 15
can be used as PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs
(hardware serial ports), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB
connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It
contains everything needed to support the microcontroller,
simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it
with an AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started. GT-511C3 is
a small embedded module that consists of an optical sensor
mounted on a small circuit board. The optical sensor scans a
fingerprint and the microcontroller and software provides the
modules functionality which automatically processes the scanned
fingerprint. The module itself does all of the heavy lifting behind
reading and identifying the fingerprints with an on-board optical
sensor and 32-bit CPU. It has an increased memory capacity.
The module is small and easy to mount using two mounting tabs
on the side of the sensor. The on-board JST-SH connector has
four signals: Vcc, GND, Tx, Rx. It can easily store different
fingerprints and the database. The LCD display is 128x64 dots
and it has blue backlight. [5]
There will be two types of verification system. One is manual
verification system and another is FPS (Finger print System)
verification. Vote will be allowed if any of this will be
successful. All candidates’ individual votes will be stored in
EEPROM. That’s why microcontroller can get the number of
votes of all candidates after reboot. We used a buzzer to give
some security alert for transparent voting system. There
is a Liquid Crystal Display to show guideline messages. It has

International Journal of Engineering and Technology (IJET) – Volume 5 No. 6, June, 2015
ISSN: 2049-3444 © 2015– IJET Publications UK. All rights reserved.
371
one red and one green colored LED to show various events by
different presentation. Here, we used a term called "Pre-Armed
Check" which helps us to ensure that all buttons are working
properly. If any buttons have trouble then the device will not
work. There is a SD card to store data that gives extra security
for any types of loss of data. There is RTC module to get the
actual time. [7]
A. Library reference:
• Fingerprint Library
• EEPROM Library
• Liquid Crystal Display Library
• Software Serial Library
• Serial Peripheral Interface Library
• SD Card Library
• RTC Module Library
B. Global Variable Initialization:
Hardware, External Storage and Communication purposes
• A new text file on SD Card to store records
• Software Serial including fixed Rx and Tx pin
• Liquid Crystal Display including fixed pins
• Fingerprint Module initialization with pins
C. Calculation purposes:
• Individual candidates votes(Integer)
• Total Casted votes(Integer)
• Few boolean variables
D. First Setup
Step 1 :( Initial Setup)
• All types of Serial communication initialization
• LCD Initialization
• Gets time from RTC module
• Power On Fingerprint Module
• All pins mode selection
• On red LED
Step 2 :( Pre-armed Check)
• Checks all the buttons and will continue if everything is
ok
• "Pre-armed checks... press all buttons" displays on LCD
• If every button works then displays "Armed Successfully"
and goes to Step 3
• Otherwise displays "Check all button.." on LCD
Step 3 :( Startup message)
• Displays "Electronic Voting Machine" on LCD
• Then shows a LED sequence and displays "Starting" on
LCD (Blink red and green LED for a few seconds)
• Then displays "Device started" and goes to Step 4.
Step 4 :( SD Card Initialization)
• Displays "SD card initialized" if everything is ok and goes
to Step 5.
• Otherwise displays "SD card not initialized"
Step 5 :( Read Vote)
• Reads all candidates individual votes from EEPROM and
goes to Step 6.
E. Main Algorithm
Step 6 :( Read Pins)
• Checks current status of all input pins and save these status
to boolean variables
• Goes to step 8 if “give_access” pin is high
• Goes to step 7 if “FPS_verify” pin is high
• Goes to step 11 if “Finish” pin is high
Step 7 :( Voter verification)
• Enables FPS module and verify the fingerprint.
• Display "Press Your Finger"
• Goes to step 8 if Fingerprint is matched and displays
"Verified Voter"
• Goes to step 6 and give security alert if Finger is not
matched.
• If cancel button_pin is high then verification is stopped and
goes to Step 6.
Step 8 :( Ask for Vote)
• If any candidate button pin is high then counts relevant
candidates vote,
• Shows an LED sequence and goes to Step 9.
• If cancel button pin is high then access is canceled and goes
to Step 6.
Step 9 :( Cast Vote)
• Vote will be finalized and red LED will be on
• Save to EEPROM and SD Card
• Access off for vote and goes to Step 6.
Step 10 :( Reset History)
• Erases all candidates votes
• Delete SD Card data
• Replace 0 to EEPROM
• Goes to step 6.
Step 11 :( Finishing process)
• Make the full system off. [9]

International Journal of Engineering and Technology (IJET) – Volume 5 No. 6, June, 2015
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Figure-1: System flowchart

International Journal of Engineering and Technology (IJET) – Volume 5 No. 6, June, 2015
ISSN: 2049-3444 © 2015– IJET Publications UK. All rights reserved.
373
6. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
The proposed framework has been successfully implemented.
The steps of total implementation process are shown in the
following figures from Figure-2 to Figure-10.
Figure-2: Pre Armed checking starts
s
t
a
r
i
n
g
f
o
r
v
o
t
i
n
g
Figure-3: Pre Armed checking continues
Figure 5: EVM is starting for voting
Figure-6: Display showing device parameters
Figure-7: Finger print scanning
Figure-4: Pre Armed checking completed successfully

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Figure-8: On-board light indicates the presence of a legal voter
Figure-9: Voter selecting the desired candidate
Figure-10: Display shows the total number of vote casted for
each candidate
7. CONCLUSION
The paper turns out to be a vivid manifestation of a transparent
voting system which undoubtedly is a better one than the
orthodox ballot voting system. The security layers and
technology featured in the gadget would surely work as basis for
conducting secured e-voting. Voting process with this system
overcomes most of the problems faced during the
voting period. This will surely ensure a safer voting method
which is very much what is required for a healthy voting system
of a nation.
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[2] R. Udupa, G. Garg and P. Sharma, “fast and accurate
fingerprint verification”, International Conference on Audio and
Video-Based Biometric Person Authentication, pp. 192-
197,2001.
[3] M. Khan, “Fingerprint biometric-based self-authentication
and deniable authentication schemes for the electronic world.”
IETE Technical Review, vol.26 (3), pp. 191, 2009.
[4] L. O’Gorman, “An overview of fingerprint verification
technologies.” Information Security Technical Report 3.1, pp.21-
32, 1998.
[5] www.arduino.cc.com
[6] Sanjay Kumar1, Manpreet Singh, “Design a Secure
Electronic Voting System Using Fingerprint Technique”. IJCSI
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[7] Michael Margolis, Arduino Cookbook, Second Edition,
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[8] Massimo Banzi, Getting Started with Arduino, Second
Edition, O’Reilly publishers
[9] https://drive.draw.io