IEEE 7th International Conference on Smart Structures and Systems ICSSS 2020

Biometric Based Secured Remote Electronic

Voting System
Samarth Agarwal Afreen Haider Abhishek Jamwal
M. Tech Scholar M. Tech Scholar M. Tech Scholar
E&CE Department E&CE Department E&CE Department
NIT Hamirpur NIT Hamirpur NIT Hamirpur
samarthagarwal30@gmail.com haiderafreen2016@gmail.com abhishekjamwal211@gmail.com

Param Dev Rajeevan Chandel

M.Tech Scholar Professor
E&CE Department E&CE Department
NIT Hamirpur NIT Hamirpur
paramdev96@gmail.com rchandel@nith.ac.in

Abstract— India is world’s largest democracy and the essence of of the fingerprint, transforms it further into a digital code and
any democracy lies in the fact that people choose their own stores it into its memory. The Arduino microcontroller
representatives. But in present era, the fair election process is
facing a lot of problems like booth capturing, rigging, fake voting, commands the entire process and acts as an interface between
tampering with the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) etc. Being the fingerprint sensor, LCD, LEDs, push buttons and the buzzer.
responsible engineers, it’s our duty to do something to curb this
menace. In the commonly used EVMs, the voting process takes It is also proposed to introduce the concept of “Remote Voting”
place electronically and this eliminates the use of ballot paper to
cast votes in elections as it is very time consuming and errors which will enable people to sit at their homes and vote, just by
might crawl in intentionally or unintentionally. Today authenticity using their UIDAI identity number and finger prints. The system
of the voter is a big concern and it also should be made sure that a proposed in the present paper, shall serve with a set of
same voter is not able to vote two times. This issue can be dealt innovative advantages namely, i) Reduced rigging and
with by introducing biometric based voting system, where the
authenticity of a voter is established based on fingerprints. Hence, fake/invalid votes, ii) ease of carrying the machine, iii) faster and
the principle shall be one person, one authentic vote. In the present more accurate voting process and iv) remote voting capability.
work, a prototype fingerprint based biometric voting machine has
been developed. It is proposed that a feature that will link the The paper is organized as follows. The present section
Aadhaar database of Unique Identification Authority of India
(UIDAI), Govt. of India, New Delhi; can be embedded. This shall introduces the topic dealt-with. Literature review is presented in
facilitate all the voters to get registered on the portal section II. Section III provides methodology for carrying out the
automatically, which can be classified on the basis of regions and present project. Hardware specifications are also mentioned.
constituencies based on their unique identification i.e. their finger Circuitry and its working principles are presented in section IV.
prints. This shall enable the device developed in the present
research work, at the national level of application by using it in
Finally, conclusion is drawn in section VI.
elections conducted around the country. This shall lead to a
significant contribution for the betterment of the Indian election II. LITERATURE REVIEW
system.

Index Terms- Aadhaar, arduino, biometrics, EVM, finger-print Kumar and Begum [1] have described a voting system which
scanning, rigging, UIDAI. involves minimalistic electronics machine and majorly depends
on paper work. A ton of desk work is included to spare the data
I. INTRODUCTION of voter who needs to go to polling booth carrying voter ID card
for validation. When validation is done by election officer then
voters cast their votes utilizing electronic machine. A list of all
The most severe and frequent problem faced during conducting the candidates contesting the elections is present on the machine
and by pressing the respective button, the voter can cast his/her
elections is rigging (i.e. one person casting multiple votes).
Although, to identify people who have already casted their vote, vote to the candidate of choice. To beat this customary election
voters are given an ink mark on their finger. But still there are a framework, there is a need to contemplate the digital innovations
lot of ways by which that ink mark can be removed easily and and their security. Benjamin et al. [2] have clarified in their
this leads to chances of fake voting. Through this project, we research that in paper-based elections, voters cast their votes by
propose developing a novel Biometric based Voting framework saving their voting forms in fixed boxes which are dispersed
in order to curb the above illustrated problem of rigging. Finger over all the constituent circuits in a given nation or state. When
Print Sensor Module is a device that captures the scanned image the election period ends, all the ballot boxes are opened and in

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 IEEE 7th International Conference on Smart Structures and Systems ICSSS 2020

the supervision of the confirmed authorities, the votes are tallied III. METHODOLOGY
physically. There can be mistakes in counting of votes or at
times voters vote more than once in this procedure. In some In the EVM system in the present work it is proposed to use a
cases vote count is even manipulated to change the result of the finger print sensor to confirm the authenticity of voters by
election in favour of a particular candidate. Along these lines taking their biometrics into the framework. Figure 1 gives the
they proposed an electronic voting framework that will block diagram of the complete process. Here 5 push buttons-
consequently perform confirmation, approval and checking with Delete/Okay, Check Match, Register/Back, Move Up and Move
the assistance of UIDAI. The proposed electronic voting system down have been used. Register and Delete key have double
can be executed alongside the customary election system as well features. The Register key has two features namely new
[3]. The proposed approach will utilize the data given by the enrolment and going back functionality. In the original
UIDAI. The system proposed and the strategy completed has machines, this task can be done using the Aadhaar ID. To
basically the following stages: enrolment, confirmation and register, the voter needs to press the register key and then enter
approval. the ID. LCD guides the entire process cycle. Now if at this time
Chaum [4] and Shalini et al. [5] have proposed a fingerprint user wants to abort the process, then he/she can go back by
verification system utilising “minutiae extraction technique”. All pressing the Register (Back) key again. Using the move up and
the fingerprint recognition systems are pretty much dependent on move down keys, the user can enroll new fingerprints and also
minute matching and database hashing, which have been all select the storage location or ID where these impressions are to
around contemplated. Ackerman et al. [6] have stated the be stored inside the framework. To move ahead and proceed, we
consequences and future possibilities if the smart e-voting need to press the okay key and to delete any impression that has
system is implemented practically. There are two basic level been stored previously which is of no use anymore, we can press
principle objectives that have ascended from the voting the delete key.
procedure- (i) an individual's fingerprint won't change the All these keys and their corresponding push buttons have
structure normally after around one year after birth (ii) the clearly been marked for GUI support. The purpose of the Match
fingerprints of people are different. Even the twins don’t have key is to establish the legitimacy of the voter. If the fingerprint
the same fingerprints [7]. The possibility of matching huge matches with the print stored in the database then the user is
number of fingerprints with large amount of electoral voters’ authorized to cast his vote. The module takes a scanned image of
data raises a question of speed. But the technique of Advanced the fingerprint and converts it into a digital template containing
Hashing eliminates the speed concerns and adds remarkable hills (represented by binary 1) and valleys (represented by binary
speed to the entire process [8]. 0). Each user gets three attempts to verify the biometrics and
Another research [9] has addressed the idea of ‘‘digital after that the buzzer starts to beep and the entire process comes
pseudonyms’’ and ‘‘untraceable electronic mail’’, which can to a standstill. If the authenticity is established, the voting
apply for e- voting and its security and anonymity. The concept process starts. The voter gets a list of candidates contesting the
of Block chain was used in an attempt to establish a fair election elections and he votes for the contestant of his/her choice by
process, but the system turns out to be too complex to be actually pressing the button in front of the candidate’s name and the vote
implemented [10]. Gajabe [11] has introduced the concept of count gets added into the framework. Finally, after the election
remote elections in his research. Few researchers during recent period ends, the results (votes obtained by each candidate) are
era propose that the Aadhaar database that the government of obtained by pressing the Outcome key.
India already has can be linked with the database of the Election
Commission of India and thus the entire electoral process can be
modified so as to involve biometric verification before a voter
casts his/her vote [12]. Due to the feasibility of the idea proposed
in these papers, a lot of research is being done lately for
developing more efficient finger print extraction techniques [13].
In Ref. [14-15] an “adaptive pore model” for “fingerprint pore
extraction” has been proposed where automated recognition is
done using the sweat pores. A computationally expensive
“skeletonization method or unitary scale isotropic pore model”
has been utilised.
All these research works show the vast possibility and large
scale merits of actually implementing the Biometric fingerprint
based electronic voting machines for conducting the unbiased Fig. 1 Block Diagram of process flow.
election procedure. Hence, the same has been attempted in the
present work. A fingerprint based remote EVM using Arduino is
proposed to ensure fair and square election process. As the voters come to the polling booth to cast their votes,
they need to press the Match key. As soon as the match key is
pressed, the buzzer beeps and the LED glows. After that the
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 IEEE 7th International Conference on Smart Structures and Systems ICSSS 2020

LCD asks the user to keep the finger over the fingerprint sensor. A. Hardware Specifications
Every user gets three attempts to place his/her finger. Once the
module captures the image of the finger it finds its associated ids • Controller unit
present in the database using hashing. As soon as the id is
matched the LCD shows “voter authorized”. And the second The controller unit of the whole design is Arduino UNO R3
voting stage begins indicated by the glowing of the Green LED. which is a microcontroller. The board is based on
This enables the voter to vote for the candidate of their choice. ATMEGA32. The board has a combination of the PWM type
This is done by pressing a new set of keys in the matrix. and digital signals. In our model we would access the
fingerprint scanner module using the pulse width modulation
Presently in the event that a similar voter comes and needs to pin and one digital pin. The matrix keypad is connected to
cast a vote once more, at that point the framework will display analog pins. The code to run the set can be downloaded from
“Already Voted”. Thus, the same voter can't cast a ballot again the computer to Arduino board using USB connector.
in any condition and buzzer will blare for 3 seconds. Likewise in
the event that by some coincidence or deliberately any non-
enrolled voter comes to cast a vote, at that point fingerprint
module won't be able to detect the corresponding ID into the • Fingerprint module
framework and the LCD will display “No Fingerprint Found”.
Flowchart given in Figure 2 presents this whole process clearly. The fingerprint module used in our model is R307. The
The specifications of the hardware required for accomplishing fingerprint module, captures the fingerprint and saves it to the
the prototype model of the proposed system are as follows. memory of the micro controller, it matches the fingerprint of the
user with the fingerprint database, it has a 32-bit CPU which
interfaces with the Arduino, the 4 external wires helps to send
the data to Arduino, and the other 2 wires are voltage and
ground wires. Figure 3 shows the fingerprint sensor module
along with Arduino Uno R3.

Fig. 3 Fingerprint sensor module along with Arduino Uno R3.

• Matrix Keypad 4x4

Each key of the matrix keypad is configurable to suite our needs

we have configured each button accordingly. The key
configurations we have made and the way we have used the
keypad in our prototype for casting of votes is that we have
assigned four different keys to different parties competing in the
elections say A, B, C, D and the fifth button (#) is used to delete
Fig. 2 Flowchart of the proposed project. the record or the current database in the memory and sixth key
(*) for sending the final results to the administrator. The four
wires on the matrix keypad are connected to the 4 analog pins of
the Arduino microcontroller, this enables it to communicate with
the Arduino.
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 IEEE 7th International Conference on Smart Structures and Systems ICSSS 2020

IV. CIRCUITRY AND ITS WORKING PRINCIPLE alongside the vote, his unique finger impression will likewise be
put away on the remote server. If willingly or by chance the
The circuit proposed for the fingerprint based voting machine same individual comes to cast a vote once more, the number pad
contains Arduino for controlling the whole process. The push won't be accessible to cast the vote as the unique finger
buttons for new registrations, deletions, selection of voter IDs impression has been coordinated with recently put away
and voting process, an alarm buzzer, set of LEDs and a 16x2 Fingerprints. In this way a very high level of security will be
LCD for instructing Voter and revealing the election outcome established by abstaining from rigging and any other kind of
are all controlled by the arduino microcontroller. Figure 4 shows fake votes. Moreover, before casting the vote, the machine will
the schematic diagram of the proposed circuitry. The Transmitter check if the person voting is registered with the Election
(T1) and Receiver (R1) section of the fingerprint module are Commission database or not; by making sure that his finger
directly connected at the serial pin T1 and R1 of the Arduino print matches with the one that is already existing with the
microcontroller respectively. 5V supply is utilized for driving the Aadhaar database thus avoiding fake votes. Thus, the entire
module, taken from the Arduino board. electoral process can be modified so as to involve biometric
verification before a voter casts his vote. Thereby, ensuring fair
and unbiased Elections.

Fig. 4 Schematic Circuit Diagram of process flow.

Fig. 5 GUI interface of the circuit made for enrolling and scanning of
the fingerprints followed by the actual voting process.
The pins A0 (Register), A1 (Delete), A2 (Move Up), A3 (move
down), A4 (Check Match), D5 (Candidate1), D6 (Candidate 2),
D3 (Candidate 3), D2 (Outcome) of Arduino, are directly
connected to the push buttons with respect to the ground. Green V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
coloured LED is connected at the pin D6 of Arduino with respect
to ground through a 1k resistor and the Yellow LED is connected Different case studies that have been undertaken to make sure
to D7 of Arduino with the same method. A buzzer is also that the developed Biometric based Electronic Voting Machine
associated at pin A5. The digital pins D8, D9, D10, D11, D12, actually deals with the problem of rigging and functions in such
and D13 of Arduino are respectively connected to D7, D6, D5, a way that it can be used to carry out the actual election process,
D4, EN and RS pins of a 16x2 LCD which is configured in 4-bit are illustrated.
mode. The function of the yellow LED is to show that the
fingerprint sensor is prepared to take a finger scan and the green CASE 1:
LED shows that the device is prepared to take a vote or get Four voters namely Rahul, Anubhav, Mansi and Sandeep want to
results. This circuit helps us realise the Biometric or the finger cast a vote each. There is an election going on between two
print based electronic voting Machine. Figure 5 shows the parties namely ABC and XYZ. Rahul and Mansi came and
prototype model of the GUI interface of the circuit made for scanned their fingerprints one by one and thus voted for XYZ.
enrolling and scanning of the fingerprints followed by the actual Similarly, Anubhav and Sandeep voted for ABC. The result
voting process. came out immediately and the LCD screen displayed “A TIE”.

The Arduino is programmed in such a way that whenever a CASE 2:

voter comes to cast his vote, firstly it is made sure that his The training and placement representative was to be elected for
fingerprint does not match with the already stored fingerprints of the class so we used this device for that purpose. The class had
the people who have already casted their votes, then only the 87 students and 6 students contested for the position. All the
voter will be allowed to vote. Whenever a voter gives his vote, students were lined up outside and one student entered at a time

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 IEEE 7th International Conference on Smart Structures and Systems ICSSS 2020

to cast his/her vote. Each student came one by one, got his/her
fingerprint scanned and voted for the candidate of his or her
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The technical support from DoECE, NIT Hamirpur & SMDP-

C2SD project awarded by MeitY to E&CE Department, NIT
Hamirpur (HP) is duly acknowledged.

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