Voting is a very important part of every democracy. It helps the citizens choose a leader to represent themselves in the government. Elections take place at various levels for the different levels of government. However, the current system of voting has several drawbacks and issues; voter turnouts are low, corruption exists and people do not end up voting for the person that they truly want to vote. This project is about a voting system that overcomes the drawbacks of the current scenario and develops further on the advantages of the current system of voting in a country like India. The power of technology and blockchain is used to make the system faster, efficient, cleaner and much more simple.
- Simple and paperless candidate and voter registration.
- Easy registration for overseas voters and voting from any device with an internet connection, once acceptable proofs are provided.
- Additional transparency in the voting process - Criminal records and all forms or violence, vandalism and other activities to be projected.
- Provide a score rating for each candidate based on their records - both good and bad, over a given time frame for easier decision making
- Easy access for citizens to view details about all candidates at a single place to make informed choices.
- Vote for a particular constituency from any polling booth in the nation. Reduces the need to be physically present near the registered polling booth to vote.
- Facility to vote from home for senior citizens as well as those abroad during the election phase using VISA based validation and OCR
- Use common identification numbers like AADHAR and SSN to eliminate the possibility of voters voting more than once across districts and states
- Immediate polling results.
- Leverage the power of Azure Blockchain services to make the process foolproof. Using a distributed ledger system, everyone has access to knowledge of who has voted and the number of votes recieved by each person. We do not disclose the mapping to preserve integrity of voting and elections.
- Use of Azure APIs - Face Recognition and Detection to ensure the image uploaded by a person during registration has his face automatically. Facial Emotion Recognition to estimate if the person voting is in the right mental state to vote.
- Use of Azure APIs - Computer Vision to verify is the visa iimage passed is authentic and if the visa is still valid as well as if the credentials on the visa match the person.
- Use of Azure APIs - Azure Maps to provide the location of the closest polling booth to a person with regards to where they are currently located.
- Use of Azure Apis - Bing Search News to generate recent news with regards to elections as well as to extract and criminal records against a candidate that they have not openly disclosed.
- Azure Cosmos DB to hold details that are too expensive to be transmitted and stored across the blockchain such as images of the candidates.
- Use of Sendgrid and Azure to send OTP passwords to those who have opted to vote from home or are overseas, so as to verify authenticity.