The History About The Ivote System

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Using the decade old electronic voting where the user has to use a paper based system to votes from the user is no longer considered efficient due to the various recurring errors. So times have arrived that the paper based primordial voting system which has already problem itself an inefficient and slow procedure is changed immediately. The system that is being followed currently, from data collection procedure to counting of the votes is a manual process. Here we are proposing an automated electronic voting system. It starts with automated ID of the voter that will provide the secured database of the voters’ information.

Voter details will be stored on the MYSQL main database and there answer will be generated in graph form.

Modification of the voters’ information of the particular vote is record by their IP address, for that particular vote.

So the system will help minimize the corruption done by other, and help with voting more than once.

IN the system the voters will select either four additional answer to that one question A,B,C and D, which will provide information on the candidate voting signs on his or hers option by using there smart phone devise.

Introduction

An important factor in running a university is the need of the students participation, and that student can feel that they can voice there opinion. Collecting this type of data in a class room or lecture hall of so many students per class, would require a system to integrate directly into a university environment, and will be fun and beneficial for the student and make the lecturer more self aware of the student progress.

Public display is a form of ubiquitous computing which allow interaction with the system by the users in the classroom or on there own accord. This is the opposite of virtual reality; where a user is taken into a virtual world to interact with a system – the public display becomes part of the environment the user interact with. Public display offer a resource by which users can be informed by the front end interface, communicate and share there thought within the class room.

Mobile phones are now extremely common in the UK – over 75% of adults and 90% of young people now own a mobile phone, and this number continually increasing as new technology emerges into the market. They have become an essential part of adults and young people lives, and for most people having a mobile phone is a necessity rather than luxury. Over the past few years, mobile phones have becomes increasingly powerful and very smart, and features such as Cameras, GPS, 4G, Java etc.. and they are now becoming standard to the everyday phone. These new technology and new features on the everyday phone allow the users to communicate at much high speeds and with many more types of devices than was previously possible.

This project combines the rich media potential of a public display, with the communications possibilities of a mobile phone; to produce an interactive system by which students at Greenwich University can answer the question or express there answer on the topic at hand.

Overall Aim and Rationale

The aim of this project is to develop an interactive voting system, which allows users to participant using there mobile phones. The system must be suited to deployment around the university whether it is carrying there laptop or stored on the university server. The rationale behind this project is to increase student’s interest and maintain this interest to result in increased student getting and achieving much higher grades. The two main functions of the system – to provide feedback for the students and the lecturer – using there phone as an interaction so they don’t get tired and keep there brain occupied. These functions are interrelated – the system motivates students to pay attention to the classroom and what the lecturer is saying by inviting them to provide their opinion on the matter of topic and what they think there answer is and the lecturer gave give his feedback without making any assumption on an individual student.

Motivation

In large universities such as Greenwich, with thousand off student spreading over many campuses, it is important that student can interact with the lectuer and feel not embarrassed when answering a question when they think they might get the answer wrong. This involves making sure that the student doesn’t feel cut off from the class room, and that the teacher can judge his/her awareness on the class progression. This system allows the student to share on common area to interact with each other, and share their answer across.

Moreover the aim is to keep lectures away of their student knowledge and see there weaknesses and strengths, the motivation for their study become apparent when they looked at the current situation at last year class when every student in the Computer Science failed one a certain test because the lecturer wasn’t aware that the students wasn’t learning anything and was going to fast for them to pick anything up. The lack of any news or evidenced was shown to the lecturer hence everyone failed one of thee tests. This factors, and the fact that the lecturer and student wasn’t communicating showed there is a certain isolated between them both led themselves of living in a bubble, students become more and more detached from the learning side and wasn’t paying any attention. Student at the university are aware of the problem also are the lecturer themselves.

Aims

The project is to develop an interactive voting system with which users can participate using their mobiles phones.

Voting Component Aims

To create an attractive and eye catching front end to the system, which rotates randomly through a set of question, showing:

The question that the user can cast their answer on.

The current voting outcome of that question.

Information on how to cast their answer and what to do.

To create an easy to use application to run on modern devices, to allow users to cast their vote/answer.

To create an application of web browser to retrieve their answer and update the front end with a chart visualising the vote scores.

To provide a QR code so that the user will not have to insert a unique IP address instead they will have to scan the QR code to generate a set of button for their answer.

To provide a central database of questions, of which

Graph/ QR Code Components Aims

To show their answer whilst showing a chart of numbers of voters and what they have ansered anonymously.

To generate a QR Code for the students so that they can scan without a unique ID key connected to a Hot Spot from a device.

Report Overview

The remaining chapters of this report are as follows:

Literature Review

Introduction

In this project for wireless voting app it will be developed as part of the Greenwich Campus project. This is an important area of development because the opinion of students is pivotal to the future of the university, and such a system can increase awareness of important matters.

My knowledge of this field at the start of the project was casual. I knew generally about bitmaps without knowing anything specific about the formats, compression techniques and overall structure of the graphic images I was using. As this is a subject I am interested in making my career in, measuring the ‘quality’ of images and how this can be affected by the right or wrong choice of a file format seemed a natural choice of study which I knew would be both challenging and interesting.

The learning curve embarked on has been considerably steeper than previous work I have undertaken. The software component constitutes my first true software development culminating in a final product. My previous knowledge of the C language did not cater for the scale of this work, and my skills in Pascal, as used in Borland Delphi, were only of a basic level. Through the development I have learnt everything necessary about these languages and how they can be applied to creating file conversion software.

From the theory aspect, I have done much research into the principles of image storage and its related areas including compression and decompression, colour spaces and conversion between colour systems, image displaying, conversion between file formats and some advanced techniques used to enhance compression ratios and allow such features as real-time full-motion video.

The project will involve three phases: the development of a graphical front end to the voting system; the development of a method of interaction with mobile phones, and the development of a web based administration tool.

The results of the proposed project will be an integration system capable of receiving input from mobile phones, manipulating the received data outputting it to the users in a graphical form via Mobile phone devices.

Furthermore the proposed system will provide an attractive graphical front-end which acts as the main point of interaction with users and this will be distributed over via mobile phones and the web site. The topics that on which users can vote can be edited by the students using web based administration tool.

The system will be called is Vote X and the URL will be called www. Vote-X.co.uk will be used to access any online elements for the project and so forth.

It is an improved version of what you created for your initial report.

Try to avoid using quotes if at all possible

"You don’t get any marks for quoting other people"

Blah blah blah

Yadda yadda yadda

Yadda yadda yadda

Blah blah blah

Key issues to use in the design and implementation

Conclusion

Review of Other voting systems

Introduction

The national committee Electronic voting system Tallinn 2005

Overview

The subject of e-voting has been actively discussed in Estonia on different levels since the beginning of this century. There exists an opportunity and motivation to implement such a project with the purpose of offering voters a possibility of e-voting at local government council elections of 2005, for:

Appearance

Usability

The proposal could maintain the major principle of e-voting; which is of being similar to regular voting system.

The system was compliant with the election legislation and principles and was at least as secure as regular voting.

Therefore e-voting must be uniform and confidential, so the national committee could successfully make the system identical and also maintain the highest level of security.

The national committee ensured single vote for a single person by re-voting and considering the last given vote on their web site. They will again arrange traditional system of voting if any person wants to change his opinion and this vote will get higher preference than evote.

The process of collecting votes was secure, reliable and accountable.

Product 2

Product 3

Key issues to use in the design and implementation

Conclusions

Requirements Analysis

Results of surveys

Results of interviews etc

What did you decide to create based on this?

Functional specification.

Design of The voting System

Disucss your creative methods

User testing of these

Discuss the different alternatives and explaining why you chose the ones you did.

Visual design: e.g.

Include some images for illustration of key points

Refer to appendices containing story boards and more.

Technical design. e.g.

Explain how ERD etc were arrived at

Navigational structure of product.

Show simple diagrams

Refer to appendices containing detail technical stuff.

Justify your decisions referring back to Literature review.

Development of………..

Based on your designs now discuss how you implemented then

Did you have to make changes?

Were there any technical problems you hadn’t foreseen?

What advanced coding did you create / adapt?

Put relevant snippets in the text, refer to more complex examples in the appendix

Explain what and why you did what you did.

Don’t give lots of boring detail explain the skilful decisions and techniques you used and implemented

Discuss any interim testing you did.

Refer back to the research you did.

Legal, Social, Ethical Issues

These three areas will overlap and you are not expected to be a legal expert, but you should show an awareness of what impact they may have had on your project.

e.g.

data protection act,

research ethics,

how people may react to your product.

Copyright issues,

health and safety

Security

Accessibility

Offensiveness

Accepted standards

Evaluation

Your white/black box testing.

Run accessibility tests.

Final testing of project by users and clients

Your review of the product

Your review of the process of the project.

How the project may be taken forward by you or others.

Conclusion

This chapter discusses whether this project has met its objectives and aims, and suggests how it could be improved in future developments.

Review of Aims

As previously mention the iVote System meets all the aims originally specified for this project, and the two components of the system – voting and interaction – have been implemented. The majority of the requirements have also been met.

The project has researched the field of public display in depth, and has utilised the findings from this research to ensure the system is successful. Other public display systems have been investigated to an in depth with my supervisor and by my self, to ensure that the iVote system avoids any problems previously encountered in these systems, yet also learns from their success. One particular strength of The iVote System is that, because of the level of abstraction from the local host components, the screen can be deployed at any location with an Hotspot or an internet connection, yet still be managed centrally using a the Hot spot.

The usability and functionality of The iVote System that is has been proven against human connectedness principles and through a heuristic evaluation, and real-world testing has been carried out with more than ten participants. The testing that show that the participants enjoyed their experience with The iVote System, and agree that there is a need for this type of system in the university environment, and that is unique and one of a kind, for the university.

The completed iVote System is an effective way of increasing students interest in a class room which ever student is shy and they can vote without having to be embarrassed. And the results can increase the lecturer awareness of the student by the result gauge.

Suggested Revision to Design and Implementation

Areas for functionality and usability improvements have been discussed throughout the report. The main areas can be summarised into six points.

Simultaneous Voting

The server application currently only accepts one IP or Vote per phone, until the next question is shown at any time, due to un-limited voting whoever has access to the Hotspot they may experience the slow connection when connecting to the Hot spot do show the option A,B,C,D. So to have limit with a cap on how many people who can vote at any given time will be relatively quick and easy to simply only allow 10 – 12 students vote instead of 50.

Distribution of Client

Real-world testing found that many participants were unfamiliar and inexperienced with using their mobile phone as a QR scanner, leading to problems in downloading the client application. Other methods of distribution are discussed ……..

Compatibility of Client Application

Real-world testing found that some participants had problems running the client application on their mobile phones, due to inconsistence in download time and the use of the display of the four buttons on the screen. Greater testing, on a wide range of mobile phones, is required to eliminate this problems from future versions of the iVote system.

Performance Front-End

As discussed……. The performance of the front end was less than ideal. If I was going to use the server on a different platform for development such as blackberry or later devices, the performance would have to be greatly improved. Performance on the front end as it stands now appears to run smoothly on all platforms as it runs in HTML5. However it hasn’t been extensively tested on this platform. More research would need to be conducted and carried out into how to improve performance for future versions with people with who doesn’t have the latest phone.

Theme Front End

One real-world testing participant suggest the idea of introducing some themes into the front end, to improve visibility for the visually impaired, on different types off question or sound for the deaf. This would require extensive changes to be made to the front end, and perhaps some way of storing theme setting remotely in the database per question.

Error Handling in the Front-End

As discussed….. , greatly improved error handling is required in the front end for the iVote System.

Handling of more than three answer question

All components of the system would have to be modified to handling questions with more than three answers option in PHP. This could be considered quite an important area for improvement, especially if the system were to be used for student voting for a particular subject or course where more than three candidates can vote for any course or subject that they wish to go into.

9.3 Further Work

This section examines some ways in which this system could be extended in the future.

9.3.1 More than one option on the Device.

The student could be asked to vote for more than one answer on there hand hold device which could end up being four answers with two possible answers which are incorrect, each vote cast by the student will end up in the MYSQL database as an exception on this particular question as they are voting for more than once, moreover there was a possibility that the question will be picture based so instead of the answer A,B,C,D being on there phone an image of the question will appear.

9.3.2 Touch Screen Facility

Instead of only allowing interaction through mobile phones, within a class room, a participant mentioned that having a login in device, therefore you phone would be a potential login in, with some phones you have the choice of using it as a wireless card, so once upon entering a room, you just swipe your phone like an oyster card which will automatically generate button for you so your ready for the lecturer once a question is shown.

9.3.3 Screen Management

If the screen encounters an error and must be reset, a system administration must go to the physical location of the screen and reset it manually. A remote system such as a Remote desktop could be installed to allow the system to reset a computer remotely, and the iVote system could be set to start automatically when the lecturer decided to restart the program again.

Summary

Implementing this project has given an insight into managing a complex software project that spans over many components and different technologies. I gained particular knowledge in the area of HTML5, Hotspot, MYSQL and JavaScript, while completing this project.

This chapter has concluded that the original aims of this project have been met, and future development and possibilities for the further work have been identified. The project as a whole can be considered a success.References

References should be ordered alphabetically by the name of the author (or, if there is more than one, the name of the first author. The Harvard system is used. Each reference should state the author’s name and initials, date (in parentheses), title, publisher and place of issue (if known) e.g. Seber G.A.F. (2003), Multivariate Observations, John Wiley, New York.

If the reference is to a journal or to a conference proceedings article, then the journal title, volume, number and page numbers should be added, e.g. Parna s D.L. et al (2001), Evaluation of Safety Critical Software, CACM, Vol. 33, No.6, pp. 636-651.

Using internet sources you should ad the word "online" in brackets after the title of the work, plus the URL after the name of the publisher.

Original Project Schedule

Have several appendices (A,B,C…). These should include detailed and technical documentation such as table of results, diagrams, program source code, etc, which are essential parts of the project but not directly a part of the main discussion in the report. All contents of appendices should be exclusively, products of the student’s own work.

Other materials used during the project work (such as information from user manuals, interview notes, etc), which it is necessary to include, should if possible be summarized to only a few pages before entering into the appendix. Original copies of such material should be kept by the student and may be required to be produced as supporting evidence of their work.

Examples of key coding may be provided in an Appendix but generally it should be uploaded via teachmat or on the P drive with its associated software.

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