Towards a secure electronic voting system enhanced with mobile telephone technologies. Case Study: Uganda Electoral Commission

Abstract

With the rapid growth of the Internet and mobile technologies, electronic voting appears to be an alternative to conventional elections. Various Information Security such as cryptography, biometric authentication, are being combined with mobile telephone Technologies, which have contributed towards a secure electronic voting system enhanced with mobile telephone technologies as articulated in the literature. Literature reviewed by the researcher indicated that a lot of work has been done by researchers around the world in the area of electronic voting. However, many electronic voting systems have failed to satisfy voters’ expectations. Security is considered a big concern for electronic voting, hence drawing the attention of research over the recent years. In Uganda, the development of appropriate and scalable voting systems has been difficult to achieve. Traditional paper-based voting system currently used is associated with problems of voter lists manipulation, ballots stuffing, voter intimidation, and vote buying. Biometric voters verification systems (BVVS) used by Electoral Commission (EC) in the recent elections for voter’s verification were standalone systems and not connected to EC central database servers. In this project, the researcher developed a secure electronic voting system enhanced with mobile telephone technologies, which is suitable for voting over a biometric mobile device that is linked to the BVVS to EC database servers. The electronic voting system uses a biometric authentication method that ensures the authenticity and verification of a voter using fingerprint recognition technologies is done over mobile device. User passwords to access the electronic voting system are also encrypted using Java custom 8-steps encryption algorithms. During the voter’s registration, the system captures the voter’s details including the voters fingerprint patterns and the information is stored into the database. User passwords are encrypted by generating a reservation code of 6 alpha numeric characters that is random and unique safe. During the voting process, the system verifies the voter’s fingerprint patterns by matching the already existing patterns stored in the database before the voter is granted access to cast the vote. Thus, the adoption of this method eliminates the traditional use of a voters ID and ballot papers to cast the vote.