What are we planning to build?
So, basically in most of the colleges/educational institutions in India elections are conducted for the position of General Secretary in disciplines such as Academic affairs/Technical affairs/Cultural affairs/Sports affairs and many such. But still the elections are held like we are in 20th century, all that old paper ballots and stamps. We propose a system through which colleges/educational institutions or any other organisation can conduct elections for any position/appraisal/review/feedback form.
How does it work?
There will be biometric setup at the entry of booth. After enrolment/employment number and biometric verification (fingerprint authentication), the person will cast his vote in a system. A system (end to end encrypted) will accept his vote. Till this everything was so trivial, but our main focus is to ensure that the vote count should not be tampered. So, for that, we are using the concept of hashing along with blockchain mechanism to ensure that. Every user id i.e. enrolment/employment number will be hashed with a randomly generated hash function. With another hash function, the Aadhar number will be hashed so that the details are safe. A database (based on blockchain mechanism) will be created. It will constitute the hashed id, hashed Aadhar number and the time stamp of the voter (the time at which voter casted vote). In our applictaion as we are already providing security at the time of voting we can also use this idea to enroll new users at the time of voting and verifing them using their biometrics.
Practical Example-
Let's say there are X parties/people contesting in election, according to the number of eligible voters, for each party N different hash keys will be generated and stored. The load will get balanced in this way, also with so many different (particularly X * N) vote countering columns, one cannot tamper the vote in favour of his party as he will not be able to know which column corresponds to which party vote count. At last, all the X * N counters will be re-hashed to count the vote. In this way, there will be no need to use paper ballots and time will also be saved as the vote count can be accessed as soon as the election ends.
NOTE: - We can implement this whole system on an online platform so that people need not to come to booth to cast their vote but in a country like India, people can be threatened to vote to a particular party by many means and powerful people will stand on head of voters to vote in favour of them in online system. Also, online system will create possibilities of bribing and will create vulnerable sites in terms of ethics.
How users can get started with the project?
Just upload the database of voters. And the system will automatically retrieve the Aadhar data using biometric authentication from government databases.
What datasets are we using?
As such we will not have the access to any dataset whether it be Aadhar number data provided by government or the voter database provided by the institute. We will only be retrieving the data at the time of a particular request to the REST API without having access to whole system database so that private information doesn't get compromised. Also, we are eliminating the need to update the data every year.
The technologies involved- We are planning to build a Web App with an HTML, CSS, JavaScript based User Interface. We will be using JavaScript as the programming language to interact with the Azure Blockchain Workbench REST API. As HTTP requests to the REST API are already protected with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), to make an authenticated request to the REST APIs, client code requires authentication with valid credentials (In our case the biometric data) before you can call the API. Information about users will be provided using database views in the Blockchain Workbench SQL DB.