ELECTRONIC_FINGER_PRINT_VOTING_SYSTEM (1).pdf

LIST OF TABLES

Over the years, most educational institutions including Garden City University College (GCUC) have seen manual ways of conducting elections for their student bodies that mostly poses many problems such as over-voting, invalid vote casts and perceived unfairness. These problems and many others have been thorn in the flesh for most EC officials who conduct such voting events for their institutions. To help the EC officials in GCUC in this dimension, the researcher embarked on application of technology in solving the afore mentioned problems by designing and implementing an electronic voting system with biometric verification that provides reliable results and secured voting procedures. If this application is accepted and implemented, it will not only keep records and generate voting results but will also provide very secured environment to enable free and fair election. Moreover, the application has implement better data structures and algorithms that make it running fast.

Though the project's product was meant for GCUC, it had been designed with the intention of replicating it for other student bodies or associations in any other institution that may require the services of such application in their voting proceedings. P a g e | 10

BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

Garden City University College (GCUC) is a university college situated at, Kenyasi-Kumasi in the Ashanti region of Ghana, West Africa. It is a pioneering institution that seeks to produce innovative, well-grounded and well-rounded business executives, entrepreneurs, analysts and researchers who can meet the challenges of our time, in the increasingly sophisticated global village. GCUC has the mission and vision focused on innovation and believes that great achievements could only be attained through diligence and commitment to work. GCUC is affiliated to a number of international and national institutions to achieve its goal. Although it young (little over a decade), it has produced numerous social giants in the country.

In the traditional elections, a voter used to cast his vote by using ballot paper. This is a long timeconsuming process; it's really takes long time and the probability of error is very high. This situation remains till the scientists discovered the different types of electronic voting machine.

The electronic voting systems are utilized much more as a device to help people to cast their opinion and vote. To let the exercising of the right, just about all voting machine all over the globe consist of voter identity and authorization, the voting and saving of the votes cast, counting the votes and finally give the election final results. P a g e | 11

The using of fingerprint as an ID is an excellent strategy considering that just about every person in the globe is born with unique fingerprint even twins born with totally different fingerprints.

The fingerprint is naturally unchangeable throughout life. The representation scheme of the fingerprints either based on global or local information such as ridges ends and ridges branches (minutiae). In this project matching algorithm combine extracting of local and global information going to be design. This matching algorithm is necessary in two stages of the electoral where the first for people registration to identify the right to elect and later on, at voting time, to allow voters to cast their vote by confirming if the man or woman meets all the requirements required to vote and that known as authentication.

GCUC has various departments under three main faculties (Applied Science, Health Science and Business Studies) as at 2017, with a general student body called the SRC and other students' departmental associations such as the GABS, GUFASSA, GACUNSA, PASAG and MELTSA.

The university runs election annually to select students' leaders into various associations above.

The SRC and the other association have positions such as following:

SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY

Voting in general requires being very precise or cost cutting to produce an effective election. To achieve this requires robust and secured software (such as this Electronic Voting System -EVS) that can help officials of voting process to manage election proceedings effectively. Therefore, crucial points that this (EVS) emphasizes on are listed below.

 Require less number of staff during the election.

 Easy to use  Reinforcement of transparency and fairness.

 Less capital, less effort, and less labour intensive, as the primary cost and effort will focus primarily on creating, managing, and running a secure online looting portal.

 Adapting to increasing number of voters as individual voters join in, especially in student societies where lectures might be in session during election.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Voting has been parts and parcel of student bodies in various educational institutions Ghana.

GCUC as a university college has various student associations that embark on election each year for the selection of new leaders that will oversee the smooth running of such associations. Over the years, student and candidates of such elections have been complaining of slowness, unreliability and non-free and fair elections. It would be better if GCUC acquires software that provides authentic procedures for voting and maintains election records for future references.

JUSTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM

Currently the GCUC student bodies have no software of their own to embark on election procedures and maintain their election records. In attempt to resolve the perceive problems associated with the election procedures of the associations, the SRC decided to apply technology by hiring software for such voting activities for the past two years of their annual elections.

Although it was good decision, the hired application came with its own problems such as discard of election records after results are announced and improper verification procedures. Moreover, the hired software comes with overhead cost that can drastically be reduced if the associations maintains their own application. P a g e | 13 Fingerprint electronic voting system has provided a range of advantages to the voting process. It assists perform voting in much more successful and efficient way, such as minimizing the cost of the ballot's printing and employing more staff. Fingerprint Election system also can make voting tallies faster as well as much more effectively than tired polling staff; they minimize human being mistakes in voting final result as well as minimize the expenses of the election. The significant advantages of electronic election might be reviewing in the following points: much more participation, fast process, lower costs, and precision placing and better access and versatility for the disable.

Essential reason fingerprint readers are widely used is, they offer a fast, simple, powerful, and secure access by means of a person with the good access rights can authenticate. The advocate of electronic voting provides that the comfort, flexibility, speed, cost effectiveness, and versatility and these are the main advantages of the electronic voting machine. Considering that this system has every one of these properties, it can be used almost everywhere, by the government authorities, organizations, courts, shopping malls even in all the colleges and universities.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF RESEARCH

The aim of this research is to help produce a software platform that will make elections of the associations free and fair, and authentic. To achieve this, the researcher will  Embark on reviewing existing systems that perform similar tasks  Design and implement database for record keeping on elections  Design and implement an application that handles the voting procedures  Implement Secured network platform that provides authentic voting process  Provide Electoral Commission (EC) of the university the platform to generate and announce results  Provide platform for viewing current and previous election reports P a g e | 14

SCOPE AND LIMITATION OF THE RESEARCH WORK

Although there may be many user requirements, this research seeks to focus on the major issues that had to be resolved in the voting procedures and hence has the scope as spelt out in the proposal to accomplish. This scope includes the following:

 Voter Register Module: The product shall include module for registering students who will take part of the voting. The registration procedure shall encompass taking the student details including biometric enrolment.

 Official and Voter Security Module: To ensure the authenticity of the voting processes, the system shall include security module that would ensure that both EC official and voters provide credentials before using the system. EC officials shall use their user account credentials at all times before using the system. Voters shall be verified by biometric device before casting their votes. In case of device failure, the system shall provide alternative security code for voter to cast vote.

 Result Generation Module: The system shall provide module for EC officials to generate result right after the completion of voting proceedings. The voting results shall be presented statistically and graphically for easy interpretations.

 Reporting Module: This application shall include module for all voting reporting for previous and current voting proceedings.

 Administrative Module: The system shall include modules that would be used by the system administrators to manage and maintain the software by providing the necessary settings to tune up the system.

Aside the above modules, the system will ensure the continual running over a local area network or VPN.

PROPOSED CHAPTER OUTLINE CHAPTER 1 -Introduction

This chapter gives the overview of the research which includes, background and history, statement of the problem, aim and objectives of the research and the scope of the project as well.

CHAPTER 2 -Literature Review

This chapter also gives the literature review that helps relate the proposed study to the larger ongoing discourse in the literature about a phenomenon, filling in gaps in the literature and extending earlier studies. The literature review is neither a chronological summary of related works nor a mere catalogue of previous studies published in the field.

CHAPTER 3 -Research Methodology

The methods or methodology section is undeniably the heart of the research proposal. In software and web development research projects, this section explains three main areas: data collection procedures, software development methodology and development tools and platform.

CHAPTER 4 -Software Requirements Specifications

In this chapter, the requirements specification for a software system, and a complete description of the behaviour of a system to be developed and which include a set of use cases that describe interactions the users will have with the software. In addition, it also contains non-functional requirements.

CHAPTER 5 -System Design and Implementation

This chapter shows the overview of the system architecture, system data structures and how these are to be represented in a database. Description of the characteristics of each interface between the product and its users is also outlined as well.

CHAPTER 6 Summary

This section explains all conclusions that can be drawn from evidence that all the previous sections.

In addition, it presents all contributions and make reference to how they are validated in the thesis.

More so, recommendations and future works are presented in this section. P a g e | 16 CHAPTER TWO LITRATURE REVIEW

INTRODUCTION

Voting process is known as a process for a group by means of a meeting or democratic vote in orders to take a free decision. This manner considers as the best normally found in republic and democratic governments (IDEA international, 2012) Election systems have already existed in the past hundred years. All those earlier election systems, however had been considered being acceptable in past days, they started to reveal its disadvantages, day after day. These disadvantages, lead to a huge development in the design and style of electronic voting machine. Previously back to 1960, the election systems used were all run manually. This involves, the election system that use paper, were the voters' votes casted and counted by hands. During 1961, the design of voting systems developed from manual base to electronic base where the first electronic voting system was the electronic punch card system (Giovanni, 2008). controlling, are now converted to automated systems. The supporters of the technology may believe that computer systems are effective, trusted and much more accurate, than humans, while the others believe that getting the humans guidance out of the scenario will increase the possibility big errors may occur unnoticed. It is very important to stand over what the previous researchers have already done before to be able to defeat the flaws of their e-voting machines and minimizing the problems may perhaps occur during the election process (Cetinnkaya, 2007) Electronic voting machines consist of three actors: people who will make the votes, registration authorities and tallying authorities. All the Voters have the right for voting; have to be register before the Election Day in order to be eligible voters. These authorities make sure of only authorized people give their vote and they must vote only one time during the election and then all the votes will be casted and show the final results of the voting (Anthony L, 2007).

In order to make any business decision, collecting data and information is very important and this process known as research methodology. The research methodology may include many research techniques such as interviews, publication research and surveys, it doesn't depend on the present information but it may depend on the historical information as well (Marzuki, 2008).

The aim and the objective are clearer due to the data and information that has been gathered from the previous literatures. The design model is the result of the hardware and software integration.

The design model shows the prototypes, elements, architecture and components of the system.

However, in order to make this project successful the hardware and the software must be well integrated and organized. Finding the answers to some possible questions that may come up in the primary research is the aim of the secondary research. In order to achieve successful project, solution form the researcher is necessary. In order to develop fingerprint voting system, enormous research must be done to find the suitable software that is capable to meet the project requirements. Furthermore, some technical element has to be taken into account during developing the hardware and implementing the software into the hardware. This research has to go through lot of steps in order to accomplish the desire fingerprint voting system. The research will be divided to 4 stages, which shown in the figure below: P a g e | 34

The software requirements specification encompasses the minimum hardware and software requirements that will be required by the application to ensure smooth running and performance.

Objectoriented analysis and design methods are becoming the most widely used methods for computer system design. The UML has become the standard language used in Object-oriented analysis and design. It is widely used for modelling software systems and is increasing used for designing non-software systems and organizations. After analysis, and discovering the problem of the existing system, there is need to produces a new produce a new system, which will eliminate these problems design. To carry out the design effectively, the following steps are involved:

The purpose of this section is to highlight on the implementation environment of the system. This covers the hardware and software environments for the implementation phase of the system design and development. A top-down design approach was used in structuring the program. The system

consists of modules and sub-modules which are linked up to facilitate easy flow of data and control

DOMAIN RESEARCH

Domain research is a normal research on similar previous project that can be helpful. Domain research include comparison between the already exist project base on the projects' features in order to achieve the best design for the fingerprint voting system.

The research will analysis the previous projects and discusses the researchers' recommendations in order to preventing the pervious project mistakes and in that way the proposed design will minimize or prevent the problems. Fingerprint voting system consist of hardware and software, a deep research will be made including the hardware as well as the software.

FINDINGS BY OTHERS AND SIMILAR PROJECTS

In an article belonging to (Simao, 2006) he said that the term electronic voting system is referring to the use of any computerized voting equipment to cast ballots in an election for example the use of computers or mobile. This term usually used specially to refer to voting that happen over the Internet, GSM using touch screen or fingerprint technique. All types of electronic voting systems P a g e | 18

are used to register voters at the beginning after that tally ballots and finally record votes and

show the final result of the election.

Figure 2.2: Availability of Voting Systems in 2013

Jones (2009) stipulates that every optical scanning device must include special computer software as well as hardware. The hardware part perform task of capturing a picture for the ballot card while software handle the conversion of the picture to data that the computer can understand (binary data). A ballot card will be given to each voter, these ballot cards contain the names of candidates printed on it. There is a symbol printed next to each candidate, such as a stars, triangle or uncompleted arrows. The voter can choose his preferable candidate by filling in the appropriate star or triangle or by completing the arrow. Directly after complete that action the voter should put the card inside the vote tabulating system. The computer tabulating device have the ability to recognizes the marks have been made by voters which is exist on the ballot cards and according to that the computer will record the vote. All the votes will be recorded and inserted in the computer's database and finally give the final total results. Ayo & Ekong, (2007) presents the electronic voting system using internet technology after they made a research about many types of optical voting system and they realized the weakness and peculiar problems of each adopted optical electronic voting system to avoid these problems in their project. The internet considered as one of the most adopted means of communication the countries have been developed and the developing countries. Therefore, it could be considered a good candidate for voting system around the world. Their paper investigates internet voting system with a view to improved participation, and benefit of voters in Africa as a case study.

They developed in their research a prototype electronic voting machine using PHP programming language and MYSQL Server as the database and the electronic voting system has been tested using the mobile explorer emulator.

An extensive survey of electronic voting system has been provided in security enhancement of electronic voting system's study by (Shahram M, 2009), this study presents a research of latest educational and industrial projects in the electronic voting system field, furthermore to the area's recommendations regarding the problems. It recognizes risks, possible sources of attack and what method use for attack in similar voting machine. In addition, it determines protection objectives as well as requirements of the e-voting machine. Schwiderski, et al. (2009) proposed an electronic voting system that combine two technologies the GSM and the internet in order to make advance electronic mobile voting system where the internet was handle the server and the database of electronic voting system, while the GSM authorization system is utilized to give voter authentication and enhance person who want to vote mobility. The researcher also attempted to improve the security and give much more flexibility and comfort to voters. They make the privacy of the voter secured by using a blind signature; they provided the basic structure of the proposed GSM voting machine. In future work, they said they want to implement biometric technology in their system such as fingerprint.

For more related researcher for wider vision (Meng, 2008) has been developed a fingerprint electronic voting system which brings the application of fingerprint towards voting from the mobile device towards voting where people can vote to any party of their choice from anywhere and also registration can be done over the internet from mobile device itself except for registering the fingerprint where you have to visit the electoral office. Also for future development, an additional biometric feature could be added to strengthen security such as eye. In addition, the security features at database level should be strengthened too towards accessibility of government database.

P a g e | 21 shows that the fingerprint base voting system defeat the internet base and GSM base voting systems as well as the defeat the other electronic voting system but it also has its own problems and weaknesses.

GAPS AND LIMITATIONS OF PREVIOUS RESEARCHES

Pervious researchers and developers have phased some shortages, challenges, troubles and limitation which assist in creating system that vast the vision of the current problems to overcome these troubles. Despite the specific benefits to electronic voting machine, experts of e-voting argue about the protection issue and the unequal access chances to world wide web are the main disadvantages to the system especially Internet service is a not free technology (chargeable).

Inventory problems of electronic voting machine in the four points which is Inequality problem, difficult to be secure, it may suffer from service attack and different kind of viruses.

it is obvious that the people with low salary may not be able to pay for the devices or tools used for electronic voting especially the mobile phone or the smart tags. As well as there are some people who are not able to use the computer may possibly lose their right of vote and give their opinion.

Although, kinds of viruses have the ability to do huge harm to the electronic voting system, using specific operation system, the server can easily be secured against the viruses. But the PCs, cell phones may don't provide enough security and are easily attacked with virus. These viruses may attack the computer, the cell phone, the internet, the operation system, the control unit of the system. as well as it may infringe the ballot which is supposed to be secret and privet, change the vote result or the final result of the election without the voter's acknowledgement, and minimize the justice of the voting process. If a huge number of voter's systems (computers or cell phones) are attacked by trojan, then the election should be cancelled and make the remake the election from the beginning.

Denial of service attack a denial of service is recognized by that an attacker prevents eligible users from using their resources in order to perform their votes. An attacker perhaps attempts to "flood" a network and thus reduce a legit user's bandwidth, as well as preventing access to a service, or interrupt service to a specific system or a user.

When the scientific applying new technology in order to solve one issue they may create other troubles such as, electronic voting machine have been made in order to remove ballot paper and a lot of other problems, but without having the ballot paper, the voters can't check out their votes if they are correctly recorded or not and they cannot separately validate votes' totals (Meng, 2008) As the above points which been presented and dissections, variety of technologies in a different application have been used to make and design electronic voting systems. These electronic systems can be used in, organizations, universities as well as democratic countries many researches have been done to improve these systems and reduce the errors may occur during the election process. Fingerprint is a new technology many researchers now days do projects related to fingerprint. The researchers came up with different algorithms for the fingerprint identification and matching process. The goal of the researcher these days is to increase the efficient of the fingerprint algorithm.

PROBLEM OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM.

Different electronic voting machines have already been introduced previously to enhance the election process. Since the beginning, they were questionable because the technologists as well as the community noticed that they are losing their control through an essential part of the election process.

A quote linked to Stalin (2010), states that: "People who cast the votes decide nothing at all while the people who count the voters' votes decide everything." It is actually obvious that a great voting machine signify a crucial component of a good democracy. Even though the repercussions of a not efficient electronic voting machine are not as easily obvious as those for train traffic control system or atomic energy plant control systems, they may be in the same way important, simply because the wellbeing of a community relies upon on them.

Despite the fact that most critical systems are regularly examined and analysed for security and correctness electronic voting machine aren't exposed to the same level of analysis. A variety of latest researches have indicated that most or all of the electronic voting machine getting used these days are fatally defective, and that their quality didn't fit the importance of the task they P a g e | 24

should to conduct. From this point of view the most important task in creating and developing this project is to develop, enhance and improve the protection and the security of the voting system. This can be achieved by improving the safety measures by consider variety of security actions and avoid the mistakes existing in previous machines.

The following are the problems detected from the previous systems used by Organisation for that matter GCUC.

PROPOSED SYSTEM

In an attempt to solve the realised issues relating the research, An Electronic voting system with fingerprint verification (EVS) was designed and implemented. There are many types of biometric that can be used for the electronic voting system such as eye recognition, voice recognition and fingerprint recognition. Many researches exist relating to these types of biometric recognition but for this voting system, fingerprint was used due to security, credibility and technology present.

SOLUTIONS OF THE EXISTING PROBLEM

A sable solution to all these problem is the use of computerized system (E-voting system) for high processing speed, minimum number of staff. Generally, the system will ensure the points below are achieved.

 Voter register P a g e | 25

 Secured User verification system  Avoid the school from unnecessary incurring cost every academic year.

 Voter verification -finger print  Authentication of voters  Avoiding of election of malpractices such as: over voting.

 Fast, easy and reliability.

 Accessible over the local secured network.

The Electronic Voting System is divided into the following modules:

i) The server side.

ii) The client side.

FINGERPRINT RECOGNITION

Biometrics nowadays is considered as a very vital component used as personal identification, considering that the biometric identifiers impossible to be shared between people or lost and the individual's identity can be represented by them. Biometric identification indicates to the use of eye, fingerprint, faces of the human been as well as speech characteristics. One of the most important parts of biometric process is the use of fingerprint. It is a very complicated issue, because of variations in unique impressions even in the same finger. There is one problem with the finger print which is different fingerprint impression seems to be similar, while the fingerprint impression belongs to same person look different. That why the fingerprint matching is a big deal.

Fingerprint recognition is a term called for the electronic method of identifying or verifying fingerprint images belong to humans. As mentioned earlier fingerprints are considered most important forms of biometrics that have been used in order to check the individuals' identity. An article belongs to (Aook Kumar, 2010) shows the different types of fingerprint recognitions.

Fingerprint Identification Terminology are extremely complex. Defining characteristics are used, many of which have been established by law enforcement agencies, to "read" and classify fingerprints. Even though biometrics companies like DigitalPersona do not save images of fingerprints and do not use the same manual process to analyse them, many of the same methodologies established over the years in law enforcement are used for our digital algorithms.

Biometric systems authenticate users by comparing the ridges and patterns on the finger. To break it down further, the software looks for distinctions within these areas:

Ridges The skin on the inside surfaces of our hands, fingers, feet, and toes is "ridged" or covered with concentric raised patterns. These ridges are called friction ridges and they provide friction making it easier for us to grasp and hold onto objects and surfaces without slippage. It is the many differences in the way friction ridges are patterned, broken, and forked which make ridged skin areas, including fingerprints, distinctive.

Global Versus Local Features

Two types of fingerprint characteristics are used in identification of individuals: Global features and local features. Global features are those characteristics that one can see with the naked eye and include: P a g e | 27

• Pattern Area

The local features are known as minutia points. They are the tiny characteristics of fingerprint ridges. Their two-dimensional arrangement is distinctive and is used for recognition. It is possible for two or more individuals to have similar global features but still have different and distinctive fingerprints because the local features, that is, the two-dimensional arrangement of minutia points, is different.

Global Features

Pattern Area -The pattern area is the part of the fingerprint that contains the global features.

Fingerprints are read and classified based on the information in the pattern area. Certain minutia points that are used for final recognition might be outside the pattern area. Core Point --The core point, located at the approximate center of the finger impression, is used as a starting reference point for reading and classifying the print.

Type Lines

Type lines are the two innermost ridges that start parallel, diverge, and surround or tend to surround the pattern area. When there is a definite break in a type line, the ridge immediately outside that line is considered to be its continuation.

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Delta -The delta is the point on the first bifurcation (where the ridge forks into two different directions), abrupt ending ridge, meeting of two ridges, dot, fragmentary ridge, or any point upon a ridge at or nearest the center of divergence of two type lines. The delta is located directly in front of the line's point of divergence. It is a definite fixed point used to facilitate ridge counting and tracing. Ridge Count -The ridge count is most commonly the number of ridges between the delta and the core. To establish the ridge count, an imaginary line is drawn from the delta to the core; each ridge that touches this line is counted.

Basic Ridge Patterns

To make fingerprints easier to search against large fingerprint databases, experts categorize fingerprints into groups based on patterns in the ridges. These groupings or basic ridge patterns are not sufficient for identification in themselves, but they help narrow down the search and speed up the processing time. Once a fingerprint is identified as a particular group like a whorl, the search only continues to compare the print to all other whorl types in the database and ignores the other groupings.

There are a number of basic ridge pattern groupings which have been defined. Three of the most common are loop, arch, and whorl. P a g e | 29

LOOP PATTERN

The loop is the most common type of fingerprint pattern and accounts for about 65% of all fingerprints.

WHORL

Whorl patterns occur in about 30% of all fingerprints and are defined by at least one ridge that makes a complete circle. Certain biometric products base identification on correlation of global ridge patterns, or matching one fingerprint pattern image to another. DigitalPersona believes that high quality fingerprint recognition algorithms must go one step further making the algorithm based on minutia points in addition to global features.

Minutia Points

Fingerprint ridges are not continuous, straight ridges. Instead, they are broken, forked, interrupted or changed directionally. The points at which ridges end, fork, and change are called minutia points which provide distinctive, identifying information.

There are five characteristics of minutia points in fingerprints:

Type

There are several types of minutia points. The most common are ridge endings and ridge bifurcations.

Ridge Endingoccurs when a ridge ends abruptly.

Ridge Bifurcationthe point at which a ridge divides into branches.

Figure 2.12: A Bifurcation

Dot or Islanda ridge that is so short it appears as a dot.

Enclosurea ridge that divides into two and then reunites to create an enclosed area of ridge-less skin.

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Short Ridgean extremely short ridge, but not so short that it appears as a Dot or an Island.

Orientation

The point on the ridge on which a minutia resides is called the orientation of the minutia point.

Spatial Frequency

Spatial frequency refers to how far apart the ridges are in relation to the minutia point.

Curvature

The curvature refers to the rate of change of ridge orientation.

Position

The position of the minutia point refers to its location, either in an absolute sense or relative to fixed points like the delta and core points.

The algorithm incorporates traditional fingerprint identification methodologies by making use of the extraction of minutiae features before matching require a multiple of processes, this comprise orientation calculation, segmentation, enhancement for the images, extraction for the ridge as well as filtering the image, etc. All the above processes come before the matching performing the matching. creating each user's unique identifying information for recognition. With over ten years of study, extensive research, and testing, Digital Persona's recognition engine is one of the most robust fingerprint recognition algorithms available today. The performance of fingerprint algorithms is measured primarily as a trade-off between two attributes:

False Acceptance Rate (FAR) which is the probability that an intruder will be accepted by the system.

False Rejection Rate (FRR) which is the probability that a legitimate registered fingerprint user will be incorrectly rejected by the system P a g e | 32 For that reason, developing algorithms for this project is an important issue.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

DATA COLLECTION

This research adopted a field survey approach to data collection in which questionnaires and

Interview were used to elicit information from the respondents" as a research instrument with the believe that the respondents" opinions would generate data for the analysis of the research. The questionnaires form part of primary sources of data used in this research. However, secondary sources of data were also used which were obtained from interview and internet search.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY

An iterative with systematic flow methodology has been used in the development of this system. Considering the classic life circle that enable error fixing during and after development, the Water Fall Methodology was used to as to the system is going to use a water fall Methodology, to ensure sequential flow of the system stages.

This methodology has been chosen for it classic life cycle, systematic and sequential.

DEVELOPMENT TOOLS AND PLATFORM

The project has been introduced to realize and eliminate the problems that occur in many electronic voting systems; The reason behind this project is to create fully secure, efficient, accurate and reliable electronic voting system using fingerprint technology, the system must be able to read human fingerprint in any condition with an accuracy of more than 97% using fingerprint detection algorithm. The design of the fingerprint voting system will contain hardware which is the personal computer that going to operate the fingerprint voting program and software which will handle the identification process and the voting process. All the components of the system will be integrated together and the PC will operate the system.VB.NET programming language will be used in order to build the system. The figure below shows the system design process:

System specification

This part will describe the Electronic voting system specification. In order to make the report more professional the desire system specification will be described as well as the recommended hardware component in addition to the software will be used. All the components will be described in the next paragraphs.

Hardware

All the hardware components going to be used in this project will selected to be more efficient in order to get best result. The only device going to be used in this project is computer. This computer must have high specifications in order to handle the system's operation especially when the VB.NET program need big RAM and high processor. Also, the algorithm's speed depends on the performance of the computer. laptop with Dual core processor and 4GB ram going to be used in this project.

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Software The fingerprint voting system's hardware is useless without implementing software in it; two types of software are going to operate the fingerprint voting system. VB.NET programming to design the graphical user interface also to program the identification algorithm and to program the voting process. SQL SERVER DATABASE is going to be used in order to build the database of the Electronic voting system.

VB.net

VB.net described as a strong 4th generation programming language. It is an environment for numerical computing. It is use for plotting any function or data, it is very strong tool for matrix manipulation and it is the best program language for algorithm implementation.VB.NET provides a number of toolbox such as image acquisition and database toolboxes.

Sql Server Database

SQL SERVER DATABASE is a database workbench made by Microsoft Company to help the programmer to build different type of databases using and link it to different application using different types of programming languages. It can be linked to PHP programming language, Visual basic, C#, and MATLAB®. In this project, The Sql Server Database going to be linked to VB.NET.

System structure (materials and component selection)

The System development tools are combination of tools and instruments used with the hardware and software modules in order to make the desirable machine. The explanation of these tools will be explained below.

Personal computer

The computer is considering one of the main devises in Electronic voting system. The personal commuter will work as an interface between the user and the system. The personal computer will operate the program in order to allow the voter to insert his information in to the system and to make the voting process.

Fingerprint database

The biometrics research depends heavily on the availability of the data collected. The growth experienced by the field in the last two decades has led to the emergence of a growing number of biometrics' databases. There are two types of databases; the first one is one biometric trait sensed P a g e | 39

and the other one is multimode (two or more biometric features detected). In research projects it is much better to use the fingerprint database instead of live fingerprint scanning because of the variety of databases available on the Internet, these databases was taken different types of scanners, some of biometric databases more accessible to the public or single mode or multimode, which includes the function of fingerprint sensors acquired live-scan. All the databases were used in this project to provide better testing and evaluate the system's response with great variety and different databases. The performance of the fingerprint voting system using these databases will be discussed in chapter 4 and 5.

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System's interface design

The design of the Electronic voting system is divided into GUI design and identification algorithm design. The geographical user interface will provide friendly front-end in order to make the voting process easier for the users also to attract the users and increase their participation. The identification algorithm design is very important since this algorithm will decide the individuals'

authority.

Fingerprint Algorithm design

The algorithm is written using Digital persona's program. This algorithm includes pre-processing such as image enhancement in order to make the fingerprint template clear and to reduce the noise of the fingerprint image because the noise will affect the performance of the matching algorithm.

After the image enhancement Gabor filter will handle the identification process after converting the image to finger code(text). The figure below shows the algorithm design flowchart. showing the flow of data through the system.

Transactions are input, validated and sorted and then used to update a master filer.

NOTE: -the arrows show the flow of data through the system. The dotted line shows that the updated master file is then used as input for the next update process. This is a pictorial representation of how the hardware components work with the programs of the system. It uses conventional system to represent its action and flow of control between the hardware the hardware components as show below, yet flowchart involves creating a flow model that illustrate and analyses the overall flow activities in producing a product or services.

SYSTEM FLOWCHART OF THE SERVER SIDE

Display Results

Generate results

Stop P a g e | 48

SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

In this part, a block diagram will be created in order to show the main parts of the Electronic fingerprint voting system and give a closer look to the component that will be used to create the system. The block diagrams below shows the main parts of the fingerprint voting system.

a. Polls and control units' block diagram

The system consists of ballot and control units. The control unit will be designed using the VB.NET programming language and run by personal computer and it will be used to insert information to the system. The Polls unit consists of GUI page allows he voters to cast their vote and choose their preferable candidate by pressing one buttons of the GUI. Each button in the GUI refers to one candidate. Different software has been used in this project in order to build the finger print voting system. The Digital Persona Third Party Software will be used to assemble the fingerprint recognition and matching and to build the user interface to let them insert their information in to the system. The figure below shows the software operation.

c. software user interface block diagram

The Database for the fingerprint voting system has been developed using SQL SERVER DATABASE languages the flow chart's process have been done as shown below.

d. Software fingerprint diagram

The fingerprint algorithm for the voting system has been develop using VB.net program as mentioned earlier.

SUMMARY

This research methodology is considered one of the most important parts of every project.

A lot of research method has and technologies have been discussed in this chapter. All the information and knowledge observed from this chapter will be helpful when the time of implementation come. All the important part will be used in this project has been clearly defined and the cost of the component and the software has been calculated. P a g e | 51 CHAPTER FOUR

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS AND SPECIFICATIONS

INPUT SPECIFICATION

In the input specification, we made use of the keyboard to enter the password, and user name which allows early if right and refuses when wrong. We also made use of the keyboard to supply text, or number through the application and supply text program when working with a high-level program.

All other input data for the system execution are present at menu options and is selected by sticking easily identifiable keys, example the arrows keys, example the arrow keys the alphabetic character keys, enter and escape keys. Finger print reader is also used to input/capture voters finger print into the system. And Again, the web camera is also use to capture live images of the candidates and voters.

OUTPUT SPECIFICATION

In this system, all outputs are retrieved from disk storage (database) where information resulting from both input and processing operations has been previously stored. In designing a system, one should bear in mind to minimize complexity and platform. The output, specifications are identified below

FILE SPECIFICATION

A file is a collection of related records. A record is a collection of information about someone or something of interest. Record is made up of fields. A field provides a specific item or data about the subject of a record. The system made use of two files i.

The input data

ii.

The output data

INPUT DATA

These are files previously, defined or created during processing of the system. You text area on the existing screen. However, before doing this it is important to note the following. You enter the text simply by typing it on the keyboard, while the insertion point (cursor) moves to the right as the character are typed. When a wrong character is typed, you can delete this by using the backspace key or using Del key when cursor is at the point of the text. Images are captures and finger prints are also scanned

OUTPUT DATA

These are data that contain information resulted from processing. We have the previewing of a document(results) file, and retrieving a file, previewing a document before printing. You can use the print preview command to show how a document (results) will look when you print it.

While you can't edit text in print preview, you can move headers and footers. To preview icon present there on the menu or the file menu observation: you will notice that the page where you can do one of the following;

Choose the print button in the print preview bar to print the document or choose the button to return to the previous view of the document.

TO PRINT PART OF A DOCUMENT(RESULTS).

Follow the above steps, while in the page range box, select the current page option button then click ok button.

DATABASE SPECIFICATION

There is need to provide an efficient data storage procedure for holding and securing critical information. This data storage module is known as the data base. A database is an index computer data storage and retrieval. The database management system ( additional details. Then it will be followed by the next level of data flow diagram which is level one, high level diagram (HLD) where the data stores going to be shown and the core process of the low-level diagram going to brock down to main processes that done by the fingerprint voting system and the dataflow between these processes. Main processes will be break down into children processes in other word smaller processes in order to make the work easer System with proposed fingerprint voting system:

The figures below show the levels of the proposed system data flow that will be operating on The diagram above shows that the voter who wants to cast his vote will scan his fingerprint using the Electronic voting system. The Electronic voting system voting system will perform many processes to the voter fingerprint image in order to check the authority of the voter. The output of the system either true or false, if the output is true that means the voter can cast his vote if it was false then the system will activate a warning.

Voter

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

The client/server architecture has been use in the development of this system, there the database application and the database are separated into two parts: a front-end or client portion, and a backend or server portion. The client executes the database application that accesses database information and interacts with a user through the keyboard, screen, and pointing device such as a mouse. The server executes the software and handles the functions required for concurrent, shared data access to a Sql database.

Although the client application and SQL can be executed on the same computer, it may be more efficient and effective when the client portion(s) and server portion are executed by different computers connected via a network. The following sections discuss possible variants in the client/server architecture.

Note:

In a distributed database, one server may need to access a database on another server. In this case, the server requesting the information is a client

Distributed Processing

Distributed processing is the use of more than one processor to divide the processing for an individual task. The following are examples of distributed processing in SQL database systems:

 The client and server are located on different computers; these computers are connected via a network (see, Figure 5.1 Part A).

 A single computer has more than one processor, and different processors separate the execution of the client application from SQL database (see Figure 5.1, Part B). The system has a client side with fingerprint scanning form as a user interface which will be replaced by voters table existing in the database in order to matches data. The system uses the verification mode. The enrolment mode handles the registration process in order to register the eligible users in the system; the output of the enrolment mode will be store in the database of the system.

The second mode which is the verification mode handles the process of checking the eligibility of the user by taking the user's fingerprint and matches it with the database's fingerprints; if the system found any similar fingerprint in the database then the user is eligible to cast his vote. The vote of the user will be count and store in the database. At the end of the voting process the user can check the election result by clicking the result button.

The working process of the design/system

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT

Software is a collection of programs or instructions written in any computer language, which enables flexibility to do whatever the user wants. This package can only be run and developed with the following minimum software

Client side

Minimum OS: windows 7

HARDWARE REQUIREMENT

The system functions well with a good computer compatible with a hard disk drive of 30GB. This is needed to save the program so that it can be made available any time. It requires a visual display unit (VDU) of high resolution and graphic ability for good display of all outputs. A functional CD-ROM / external drive is needed to be used as backup or disk in case the programs served on hard disk is eventually destroyed by a virus. An uninterrupted power supply (UPS) is needed to sustain power failure for sometimes whenever PHCH puts of power supply.

P a g e | 66

THIS SOFTWARE REQUIRES THE FOLLOWING MINIMUM HARDWARE FOR

ITS DEVELOPMENT AND RUNNING;

  Switch / wireless router for local area network connection

LANGUAGE JUSTIFICATION

The visual basic language is the language used in designing the program for the system V.B. NET language offers the best in terms of its availability, easy to understand good graphic ability, System selection to select a module (subsystem) when the main is displayed on the screen, the cursor is passed to choose on optional and enter to select it. If this is done, control is passed to the main program after a subro9utine is completed depending on the task that needs to be1accomplished by the user choosing the exit do terminate a subroutine, this returns control to the calling program and to terminate the system is by closing exit application from the main menu.

REVIEW OF PROGRAM LANGUAGE IN USE

There are several Program languages currently is used in school and they include Q-BASIC, PHP, C#, Visual Basic and Java etc. However, this project was done to suit interacting processing rather than batch processing, also immediately response expected from the computer as output or feedback to the input in an online processing simplifies and makes the work faster. It is a highlevel language that can be translated into a machine language and can be understood by most computers easily.

TESTING

During the design stage of the system, of the system was done to verify its efficiency and resistance to deliberate errors. This can be done in toe stages which include: - Unit testingthe performance of the individual parts is examined using test data.

 System testingthe parts are linked together and the test data is used to see if the parts works together.

ACCESS

Use of right Username and password

MENU SELECTION

The use of wrong keys for valid options

Press key randomly Press keys which choice module is being loaded user's data entry

Press keys randomly

Highlight with normal keys on keyboard

Database design

The figure below shows the database diagram of the system. In this illustration, two tables from the database has been demonstrated. first for the Voter registration process, while the other table responsible of the voting process from the table which is the candidate table. The specifications and the properties of these tables and columns are shown in the figure below.

P a g e | 68

TEST CASES

The tables below show test cases made on the system

User Interface Design

Login page-server side

Figure 5.3: System user login page

The figure above is the main login page for system user to rightfully access the system resources for usage. Registered users are only allowed with the right username and password.

Hyperlink text "NEW USER" is used for registration of new users and "FORGOT PASSWORD?"

is also use to recover user login info via email address registered in the system by user during registration.

Administrator main page-server side P a g e | 71  Webcam = use web camera to capture image of a voter  Browse = pick an image from a system location or file. P a g e | 73

Enrolling a fingerprint consists of scanning your fingerprint four times using the fingerprint reader.

To enroll a fingerprint select on a particular finger to scan.

Figure 5.6: The Fingerprint Enrolment dialog box

The above form is used to scan the finger print of the voter during the registration process.

Individual fingers are scan separately four times.

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Faculty, department and association registration page-server side Figure 5.7: Faculty, department and association registration page

The above figure represents the form for adding the respective faculties, departments, and associations. And also enables linkage among them so as to reference as to which candidates a voter can cast vote for.

Buttons and their functions

Add faculty = to add a faculty Add department = to add a department Add association = to add an association Association /department = to view and link both associations and departments candidate registration page-server side Election creation page-server side The form in the figure above is use to creation election, set an election as current election, and also to delete an election from the system database. Create button is use to save the election name entered dates of election duration. Where reset button resets the data controls, and make current button make a selected election a current.

results generation form-server side Before a voter can cast a vote, he/ she should be registered in the system. The above page is used to verify the identity of voters before their respective candidates appears for selection.

A voter simply clicks on the Scan-Finger Button to call the Digital persona's verification and matching form.

P a g e | 80

To verify a fingerprint

The Verify Your Identity dialog box appears.

1. Using the fingerprint reader, scan your fingerprint.

In the Verify Your Identify dialog box, a green check mark appears over the fingerprint, which indicates that your fingerprint was verified.

Else In the Verify Your Identify dialog box, a red question mark appears over the fingerprint, which indicates that your fingerprint was not verified. The electronic fingerprint voting system aims and objective included developing strong matching algorithm using Digital Persona fingerprint algorithm and link it to SQL SERVER database.

Furthermore, it also has GUI designed using VB.NET to control the whole application. In relation to the research work achieved, all of the goals and objectives of the specific area of research has been accomplished positively. There is a say belonging to Winston Churchill state, "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often". Therefore, improvement always has to be done in order to make a system to be perfect.

To sum up, this project clarifies the requirements and key elements of Biometric E-voting system, and my implementation provides the following features. To begin with, the accuracy of voter's identity and results are ensured with this voting system. Voters cannot cast votes more than once.

This system will validate whether the User and voter are authorized or not, to make sure only legal user can vote, and voter's authorities are limited in order to prevent his violation. Furthermore, this system fits in with the parts of principles proposed by SRC, including secrecy, noncoercibility, integrity, and uniqueness. But because of the limitation of incomplete laws and regulations, absentee voting can't be held. It still needs to be discussed in legislative systems. In the future, to eliminate maladministration and human destruction, setting up a strongly secure Evoting system is necessary. It can speed up the

LIMITATIONS

The success of any project depends critically on the effort, care and skills one applies in its initial planning. In the planning of this project, a work breakdown structure, followed by the task and time allocation has been done so as to effectively manage the different individual tasks involved in it. Each Electronic voting system depends on an important external factor which is the fingerprint's image. The resolution and the quality of the image have huge impact to the system.

This system is working perfect with low quality image but it doesn't work well with very low-quality image. Very low-quality image leads to rejecting the image or to false rejection. Database Images have a large size it has resolution of eight bits per pixel. Uploading a large number of fingerprints image and voter pictures to the database demands a large memory space as well as large number of voters mean more fingerprint picture must be uploaded in to the database and that makes the database response slower the leads to slower voting process.

The recommendation section below view the improvement and suggestion can be done to the system to enhance the performance more and more.

RECOMMENDATION/ FURTHER RESEARCH

In big elections, there are huge number of people want to cast their votes, in order to avoid the congestion at the voting point there is need to provide online Access be connected to the main computer/server in order to allow many people to perform voting at the same time and prevent congestion. Therefore, this application should be built online with a server architecture. As an improvement, multiple client machines including mobile applications should be interacting with the server simultaneously. Clients will interact with the system through an interactive GUI, while the server serves the clients request and does the processing in the backend.

Reducing the number of fingerprint algorithm size from 8 filters to 4 filters will be good idea in order to speed up the algorithm taking into account maintaining the efficiency of the algorithm during the identification process of the fingerprint.

This fingerprint electronic voting system is considered as a PC based fingerprint voting system.

For future work, it will be better to design a fingerprint voting machine works dependently without need for PC to perform the voting in order to decrease the project cost.

P a g e | 84

CONCLUSION

Fingerprints considered as one of the most popular biometric methods used for human recognition. Every person in the globe is born with unique fingerprint even twins born with totally different fingerprints and fingerprint is naturally unchangeable throughout life. For that reason, fingerprint voting system has been made and the person ID has been replaced with his fingerprint. This fingerprint voting system is implemented and evaluated successfully. The evaluation of the system is made using different PCs with different specifications in order to stand on system strength and weaknesses. The final result of the system was amazingly significant and computable with other voting system. The system's accuracy came from the image enhancement and speed of network between the clients and server.

CD-ROM

Is a pre-pressed optical compact disc which contains data. The name is an acronym which stands for "compact disc read-only memory

CLIENT

In a network) a desktop computer or workstation that is capable of obtaining information and applications from a server.

User Manual

With the system having two types of users, that is the system admin/user and the voters.

Hence the system has a default admin account. Installation is done separately on the server system and client system and linked/connected through a local area network or VPN.

Server users (admin)

1. System Admin/User must be registered as users to access the administrative forms/pages.

2. After successful login, the election must be first created through the create election menu.

3. Associations, department and faculties must be added to the system 4. candidates should be registered next.

voters can now be registered

With the above five steps, the system is ready to run an election.

Client users(voters)

Voters after successful registration can cast their votes by scanning their finger print or by keying in a voting code obtained from the server side. A welcome page with set of instructions on how to cast vote and use the system is presented as the first interface to the voter. P a g e | 92 APPENDIX C Sample Code

SAMPLE SOURCE CODE: USER LOGIN

The code below has been used under the login button of the login form to enable access the admin page of the server side of the system. Successful login will lead to the admin page else error massage pops up to ask of correct user info or gives database connection error message.

SAMPLE SOURCE CODE: VOTER REGISTER SEARCH

The code below searches for a voter within the system database when the search button is clicked on the voter register form. If voter is found, the voter data is populated on the registration form else a pop up message box appear to say "voter does not exist". Private Sub BTNSEARCH_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles BTNSEARCH.Click If TXTINDEXNO.Text = "" Then MessageBox.Show(" Please Provide Your Index No") TXTINDEXNO.Focus() Else Dim sqlSelect As String = " SELECT * from TBL_VOTERREGISTER WHERE (IndexNo=@IndexNo)"

Dim mysqlDBconnection As New SqlConnection(cstring) Dim mysqlDBcommand As New SqlCommand(sqlSelect, mysqlDBconnection) mysqlDBcommand.Parameters.AddWithValue("@IndexNo", TXTINDEXNO.Text) mysqlDBconnection.Open() Using mydatareader As SqlDataReader = mysqlDBcommand.ExecuteReader If mydatareader.Read Then TXTFNAME.Text = mydatareader.Item("FullName").ToString

Dim Sgender As String = mydatareader.Item("Gender") If Sgender = "Male" Then RBTMALE.Checked = True Else RBTFEMALE.Checked = True End If CBODEPT.SelectedValue = mydatareader.Item("Deptid").ToString CBOLEVEL.SelectedItem = mydatareader.Item("VLevel").ToString TXTVCODE.Text = mydatareader.Item("VotingCode").ToString Try Dim Picc As New IO.MemoryStream(CType(mydatareader.Item("VoterPicture"), Byte())) PictureBox1.Image = Image.FromStream(Picc)

SAMPLE SOURCE CODE: VOTING PROCESS-SUBMISSION

The code below executes when the voter submits the selected candidates to finally cast his votes using the submit button. Successful submission of votes cast will show a message as "You have successfully cast your vote" else an error message of connection to the server (database) will pops up to indicate unsuccessful operation.

Private Sub BTNSUBMIT_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles BTNSUBMIT.Click Try If MessageBox.Show("Are You sure You want to Submit", "Submiting Candidates...", MessageBoxButtons.YesNo) = DialogResult.Yes Then Dim sqlInsert As String = "" For Each cand As DataGridViewRow In dgvSelCandidates.Rows Dim candIndex As String = cand.Cells("selCandIndex").Value Dim votetime As String = getServerDateF(True) Dim pollPc As String = My.Computer.Name Dim wasVotedFor As Boolean = cand.Cells("VotedFor").Value Dim wasRef As Boolean = cand.Cells("IsRef"). MessageBox.Show("SORRY your vote has not been saved!", " Submission Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error) Close() End If End If

Catch ex As Exception

MessageBox.Show("Sorry, Your voting system cannot connect to the Server") End Try End Sub.

APPENDIX D

Sample Questionnaire

Dear student, the Gcuc-SRC is dedicated to improving students' welfare and satisfaction in all endeavour. Through this brief survey, your answers will be helpful and enhancing our election process on campus to the benefits of students and the university at large.

Table 4 .