Web-based voting system

135 WEB-BASED VOTING SYSTEM Dhanuka Perera1, Malkanthi Samarasinghe2 1University of Sri Jayewardenepura, [email protected] 2University of Sri Jayewardenepura, ma[email protected] Background An organization usually consists of many different departments and associations. Within the operations of these organizations, considering the idea of the majority is very common. Usually, elections are used to gather ideas within organizations from time to time, which could be either to determine who holds the power in the organization or to gather the opinion of the members on a specific scenario or a situation (Tabra, 2013). This applies to any country or organization which values the ideas of the majority. Thus, countries and organizations commonly use voting systems to get the opinion of its members. Currently, the majority of organizations follow the traditional voting process where they must go through a complex manual file-based process. In this process, members should go to specific places to cast their votes. Existing voting systems involve a huge amount of documentation. Since the voting process is heavily dependent on paperwork, the existing process is inefficient and very costly. Thus, developing a web-based voting system provides a solution to these problems faced by a country or an organization. This project proposes a web-based voting system which automates the entire process, reducing almost all the paperwork and documentation related processes. The web-based solution can be installed as a single instance for the organization. They can use the system to carry out any number of different types of elections whenever required as they prefer (for example, selection for positions or to get the majority opinion on different situations). The system will provide all the features required to manage the election and will also be very convenient from users’ point of view. 136 System Analysis Problem Analysis Existing issues, opportunities and directives can be identified by studying the problem domain (Whitten & Bentley, 2007). Following are the identified major issues and problems that exist in the current system, • Time consuming • Result Manipulation • Inaccurate Results • Inefficient Process • Resource Wastage Requirements Analysis After the problem analysis phase, it is a must to conduct the requirements analysis. During the requirements analysis process, the business requirements for the proposed solution are identified (Whitten & Bentley, 2007). After considering the problems and the issues identified with the traditional voting process, a web-based voting system that can be accessed by any member, from anywhere is identified as the most ideal solution. A webbased voting system will be able to reduce the issues identified when formulating documents, registering voters/candidates, calculating votes and publishing results. Any large or small-scale organization can install a single instance of the proposed web-based voting system in their organization and carry out any number of elections and response gatherings within their departments and associations. Based on the requirements analysis process, the expected functional requirements for the web-based voting system are as follows, • Election Event Management • Candidate and Voters Registration • Results and Notification Management 137 • Report Generation • Voters Anonymity and Security System Development The waterfall methodology was followed throughout the development process. After the requirements gathering, overall architecture, concepts and flow of processes were defined. The data design, the process design and user interface designing processes were carried out, as it is compulsory to design those during the system designing phase (Sommerville, 2010). System development process involved the development of the database, internal processes and the interfaces. The database for the proposed system was developed using MySQL Database Management System (DBMS). The User Interfaces (UI) and the system functions were developed using PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and jQuery technologies. For report generation and charts PHP opensource libraries have been used. Conclusion It was identified that a technology-based solution will solve most of the issues related to the traditional elections process. The web-based voting system has the potential to reduce tremendous amounts of paperwork, human errors, and result manipulation. This system will also help organizations to carry out elections effectively. However, resistant to use technology, initial setup costs and costs of training were identified as some limitations of the system. As future enhancements, it is planned to develop a mobile application, use a real time database, and to use bio-metric authentication. Hence, a web-based voting system will be the optimal solution that any organization could use as an alternative to the traditional voting process. References Sommerville, I. (2010) 'Software engineering', In Science, (9th ed., Vol. 195, Issue 4283), Pearson Education, Inc. 138 Tabra, Y. M. (2013) A Proposal for Internet Voting System in Iraq, International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering, 3(10), p. 2277. Whitten, J. L. and Bentley, L. D. (2007) System Analysis & Design Methods, 7th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.