An e-voting system for improving organization and execution of elections in Uganda

Abstract

There are no public administration tasks more central to guarding democracy than providing for elections that accurately reflect voters' intentions and ensure public confidence. Elections are viewed as one of the most important indicators of democracy in a consensus-based country and electronic voting can be one of the drivers of this democracy. An e-voting system can be used to cast and count votes with higher convenience and efficiency, and even make the electoral procedures simple and reduce the mistake rate of ballot examination. The way in which the current Ugandan voting is organized and executed leaves a gap for promoting distrust of the results due to unwarranted delays in the processing of votes, leading to wrong tallying and inaccurate declaration of the final results. An e-voting system developed in this study reorganizes all the election processes in all one electronic process. It is composed of e­ registration processes, e-voting processes, e-results tallying and e-voter-EC continued communications. The study looked at the existing voting system to understand the problem, and further reviews literature about different e-voting systems and later develops an E-voting system that maybe used for Ugandan local environment. Quantitative data was collected from respondents through a questionnaire and interviews, about a desired system that would solve the problems in the existing voting system. The system was developed basing on the derived system requirements and using Macromedia Dreamweaver8 for scripting using PHP as the scripting language, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for implementing the presentation semantics as well as HTML as the basic presentation language. Macromedia Fireworks 8 for designing images that will be embedded in the system to enhance the system. Design, MySQL 5.1.4 to act as a back-end database, and WAMP 5.0 Server to act as a platform running PHP pages to implement the system. An e-voting system developed in this study may replace the existing system for free and fair elections in Uganda and simplifies the tasks for Electorates, the Electoral Commission and the government. The final results indicate that an e-voting system can be used to carry out all the election processes anywhere anytime at voters' convenience. Several security measures were integrated into the system in order to achieve an enhanced, speedy and accurate performance.