BOEN PHILIP KIPRONO: SCT121-C004-0661/2018

VICTOR KIRIMI GITONGA: SCT121-C004-0214/2019

STUDENT ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM

ABSTRACT

This is an academic management system that provides online registration forms

for both students and delegates to identify and separate the eligible voters and
non-voters. Candidates will also have a special form to fill their student details
online. This way, each registered user has a password that will enable them to
log in to the system. It will have an interactive platform that will allow the
candidates to perform their campaigns and interact with the delegates. For such
a system, we have decided to use a Waterfall Methodology. This system will
give election results for all the posts and provides reports for the whole election
process. Also, the results will be graphically represented in percentage form.

CHAPTER 1

1.1. Introduction

This system will be used in academic institutions but can also be used in other
areas such as electing church leaders.

Student leaders are the core link between the students and the university
administration. Henceforth, these leaders are purposely elected democratically
to represent the interests of the students.

It will be used to eliminate the tendency of having spoilt votes after the voting
process. Since most of the voting process is done online, delegates do not need
to physically represent themselves to cast their votes hence it minimizes time
wastage. To make the voting process transparent because every student demand
for the elections to be held fairly and results computed accurately.

In the current system, there have been challenges that have come up thus
making the system vulnerable to disruption during the election period.
Following these challenges, we felt it was good to come up with a system that
would curb these problems to ensure a free and fair election.

The most common problem is that the current system does not notify the
number of expected voters. Bear in mind that not all of the students are
interested in the election. Our system solves this challenge by electing students
who will represent most of them (delegates) in the election period hence giving
room to identify the number of expected voters.

In the previous elections, students were expected to queue and cast their votes in
the ballots. This led to a lot of time-wasting since students focused most of their
time in voting rather than in their studies. In our system, since most of the
election process is done online, voters will not be accounted for physically. This
enables the voter to multi-task and save time.

Initially, candidates did find themselves struggling during the campaign since
most of the voters were busy and hard to reach. This resulted in delegates
casting their votes without the knowledge of the candidates. Our online platform
has an area for candidates to campaign and share their manifestos.

When it got to the counting of votes, there was a possibility of a candidate to get
a biased number of votes because of the large population of voters. Our system
has been designed to compute accurate data resulting in no errors during the
counting of votes and since hand counting of votes is time-consuming, it would
have minimized the time wastage.

1.2. Problem Statement

The previous system of elections rarely takes records of voters hence gives
chance to any person to vote as long as they have the student’s identification
cards. You may find a situation where a former student who has already
graduated able to vote since he or she has a student’s ID card and the electoral

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commission is not strict in checking the student’s details. This makes the former
student not eligible for the election process and may cause faulty results.

Students with higher authority in the election process may exploit and
manipulate the votes in favour of their preferred candidates which interferes
with expected fair elections since they have an upper hand.

The interaction between voters and candidates has been minimal since the
university has a busy environment and may communicate with each other a few
times at rallies and may not be enough for all the students to know who the
candidates are and what the candidates have for them.

The current system consumes a lot of time since registered voters have to queue
to vote and also in terms of counting the votes.

1.3. Objectives

General Objective

To develop and implement an efficient, user-friendly, interactive web-based

student voting system.

Specific Objective

i. To capture the candidate's and voter’s details.

ii. To design a system that will generate reports after the election process.
iii. To develop a transparent system, in which users can check the system
integrity without any trouble.
1.4. Research Questions
i. How will our proposed system ensure voters and candidates interact?
ii. How will our system capture candidates and voters’ details?

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 iii. How are we going to make our proposed system to be better than the
previous one?
iv. How will we make our system transparent and fair?
1.5. Justification

The success of this proposed system will make other institutions of higher level
and even secondary schools interested in using it since its benefits will have
fully justified the system’s remarkable progress. Our system will ensure high
integrity and transparency in the election process. Its platform will be user-
friendly and provide great efficiency in the voting process. Its success can also
be replicated in other universities.

1.6. Budget
It is safe to say that our proposed system will take a huge cost financially
during the election period since most of the cash would be spent on hiring
highly trained experts who know to develop our system. Then there is
also the buying of papers to be used for registration of the candidates.

1.7. Time Plan

In the previous system of elections, the election process would take a
huge amount of time in the students education timeline and could even
mess up exams and course timetables when there is a complication; but in
our proposed system it would take a short period since students will vote
online with just a click of a button. This proposed system has shown that
it is time saving.

CHAPTER 2

Literature Review

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This chapter documents the available relevant literature concerning the problem
domain. The implication was that the researcher devoted sufficient time to
reviewing research already undertaken on related problems. This was done to
find out what data and other materials are already available from earlier
research, and identify gaps that the present research may fill.

Al-Ameen, A.; Talab, S.A. 26-28 June 2012, "E-voting systems vulnerabilities,"
Information Science and Digital Content Technology (ICIDT), 2012 8th
International Conference on , vol.1, no., pp.67,73, URL:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6269229&isnumber
=6269212

Cui Zhe; Dai Xiang 15-17 April 2011, "A practical distributed electronic
voting system," Electric Information and Control Engineering (ICEICE), 2011
International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1095,1099, doi:
10.1109/ICEICE.2011.5777548 URL:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5777548&isnumber
=5776798

Gritzalis, D. (2002). Secure Electronic voting. Seventh Computer Security

Incident Response Team Workshop Syros, Greece.

Krejcie, R. & Morgan D. (1970). Determining Sample Size for Research

Activities Educational and Psychological Measurement.

CHAPTER 3

Research Methodology

This is the way of searching or solving the research problem. The research
methodology aims at answering the following questions;

1. How will the proposed system ensure only the eligible voters vote?

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2. How will the proposed system ensure that votes are not manipulated by any
factors?
3. How will the proposed system ensure voters and candidates interact?

CHAPTER 4

System Analysis

In this case the researcher analyzed the requirements, and fully understood the
problems. Analysis was conducted on the current systems failures and strengths.
This allowed a better understanding of the expected improvements. Further
analysis was also conducted on the problem definitions to clearly understand
what to tackle. This phase is usually accompanied by documentation for each
requirement, which enables other members of the team to review it for
validation.

The problem is formulated, user requirements are identified, model is built

based upon activities.

User Requirements: The user should be literate in English and eligible to use the
system. The user should also access internet in order to interact and use the
system since it’s a web based

CHAPTER 5

System Design

System Design is the process of designing the activities of a system such as the
architecture, modules and components, the different interfaces of those
components and the data that goes through that system.

 Logical Design
Logical design characteristically looked at the intended system from a
logical perspective without considering physical requirement. The project
needed a logical design that modelled the flow of data and information
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 through the system from input to output. Logical design also modelled
the security checks that the system will be using as well as the formats for
all data items in the system.
 Physical Design
The physical design is concerned with how the physical architecture of
the entire system interacted to achieve its objectives. It modelled the user
interfaces, the server architecture and the database models.

Data Flow Diagram

CHAPTER 6

Implentation And Testing

Implementation Once the designs are deemed to be viable, technical

implementation begins. Implementing the project was the toughest part as all
the coding was done in this phase. Being that the project serves only the web
platforms, coding took place in two phases

 Database coding phase: The backend relied on a robust implementation of

MySQL database. The database is relational in architecture and host

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 tables which can be abstracted into views for the front end as needed and
by access level specifications. All the system’s data is stored and
processed here.
 Web Coding The project is coded in HTML + JavaScript +PHP for the
web platform.

Testing: Upon completion of full implementation, testing occurred before it

got into public consumption. I use the design documents, personas and user
case scenarios to run comprehensive tests including the Components testing
and on the finished applications.

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