Team 14 | Elect-ron : The E-Voting App for Student Body Elections |

Project Overview

• Problem Definition

  It's corona time. Voting in this typical scenario in student council elections have become stalled. The method of using paper ballots/physical voting in a center isn't feasible and is cumbersome & time-consuming. There are a number of factors like going to polling stations, long waiting queues, bad weather conditions, traffic etc. that make traditional elections difficult for voters as well as for the officials. These factors often results in decrease of voters’ participation in the election process.

• Solution Strategy

  Online e-Voting is a critical step for the evolution of the voting process. It is an ideal means for elections of college council in this pandemic and even in normal times as we have achieved advancement in technology, peneration of internet and knowldege of security that a free and fair election can be conducted which is accessible to all memebers of the society.

  Elect-ron has been developed for college students to cast their votes anytime and from anywhere using browsers. The aim of this web app is to provide convenience to voters as well as officials who monitor the voting process. The app gives election results accurately and instantaneously.

Solution Description

The app has an easy to use interface “Login Screen” for voters where they can login with their College ids. Each voter’s data is stored in database containing their essential information such as College email account id and a voting status which stores whether voter has voted or not. After login, voters have access to voting interface “Voting Screen” that allows them to select candidates for the given positions and submit their voting data securely. Once a voter submits his/her response, then re-submission will not be permissible. Thus, Elect-ron ensures that there is no bogus or fake voting in the elections.

The tally button leads to a different which shows the real time data of the votes polled for each candidate.

The complete voting procedure is under System Admin' s control. Admin has to sign-in with the predefined id. After successful sign in, admin gets access to “Admin Screen” where there are options like adding and removing positions and candidates as well as changing the voter status. It uses MongoDB as Backend . Data is stored as JSON and synchronized in real-time to every connected client.

Implemetation

• Interface for Admin 1. Authentication 2. Adding Positions and Candidates 3. Log Out

• Interface for Tally 1. Candidate name along with their vote count

• Interface for Student 1. Authentication 2. Voting for Candiate 3. Log Out

Features

• Remote Voting - With this app a voter can directly cast his/her vote from any location by using a browser. So there is no need for any voter to visit the polling booth to cast their vote.

• Real Time Results - As there is no need of physical counting of votes, so the complete voting process executes without any manual intervention, hence making it a very efficient procedure.

• Private Poll - System administrator of the app can upload required data of all valid voters in the system. Then the whole process would be automatic & anonymous where even the system admin would be oblivious to the choices made by the student.

• Security - The Email-OTP module ensures that only students with the required credentials( valid College ID) can participate in the election process.

• One User One Vote - The OTP-FLag model ensures that a single voter can vote only one time. And trying to vote multiple times is not possible.

• Robust - The web-browser based nature of the system ensures that everyone has to go through minimal amaount of hassle( installing apps can be problematic to many if not published through play store which if done increases the cost overhead) for casting their vote. It is also extremely easy for the admin to run the app on a new system.

Architecture Diagram

• System Administrator Screen Flow Diagram

• Student Screen Flow Diagram

Technical Description

An overview of:

• Technologies Used :

  • Git, Node, MongoDB, Express, HTML,CSS

• Setup/Installations required to run the solution

  • Git, Node, MongoDB Atlas account, IDE

• Instructions to run the code :

  • Clone the repository

  •   npm i
    

  •   node app.js
    

Screenshots

• Landing Page

• OTP

• Voting Screen

• Voting Results

• Admin Panel

• Adding Candidate for a position

Team Members

List of team member names and email IDs with their contributions.

Member Name	Email	Contribution
Aryan Felix	aryan_201800461@smit.smu.edu.in	User Interface & Backend
Pramit Pujara	pramit_201800464@smit.smu.edu.in	User Interface & FC Designer
Yumn Gauhar	yumn_201800067@smit.smu.edu.in	System Design & Documentation

References

• MongoDB Documentation

  Helped us in setting up the schema of the MongoDB database

• Node.js Documentation

  Helped us in setting up routes and proper authentication system